Blog on Crossrefhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/
Recent content in Blog on CrossrefHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usThu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Speaking, Traveling, Listening, Learninghttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/speaking-traveling-listening-learning/
Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/speaking-traveling-listening-learning/
<p>2019 has been busy for the Community Outreach Team; our small sub-team travels far and wide, talking to members around the world to learn how we can better support the work they do. We run one-day <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">LIVE local events</a> alongside multi-language <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webinars/">webinars</a>, with the addition of a new <a href="https://0-community-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">Community Forum</a>, to better support and communicate with our global membership.</p>
<p>This year we held a publisher workshop in London in collaboration with the British Library in February to talk about all things metadata and Open Access, before heading over to speak to members in Kyiv in March at the National Technical University of Ukraine. June saw our first ever non-English LIVE local event in Bogota held in collaboration with Biteca, and in an action-packed week in July, Rachael Lammey and myself jetted across to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok where we collaborated with Malaysian Ministry of Education, USIM, Chulalongkorn University, iGroup, and ORCID to run two events for our South-East Asian members.</p>
<p>Despite the varied locations, speakers and audiences at these events, some common themes emerged&hellip;</p>
<h2 id="language-matters">Language Matters</h2>
<p>We currently work with member organisations in over 125 countries around the world, spanning an even greater number of languages. Whilst, at the moment at least, it is not possible to provide support across all these languages, we are improving support for non-native English speakers. We now have service <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO0pjPM4wCJRnjI6ivFXKGA/playlists?view=50&amp;sort=dd&amp;shelf_id=2">videos</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/">factsheets</a>, and brochures available in 8 languages including: French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Bahasa Indonesia. As well as expanding our webinars to include a series in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and Turkish so far.</p>
<p>Our global team of 24 <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/ambassadors/">Ambassadors</a> have been key in helping us to provide translated documentation, to run multi-lingual webinars and in-person events, and to answer questions from our members across languages and timezones. Our LIVE local event in Bogota, saw us run our first ever Spanish event with support from our Latin American ambassador team.</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/ambassadors-bogota.jpg" alt="Ambassadors in Bogota" width="500px" />
</p>
<p>I know first hand how daunting public speaking can be, particularly in a second language. As a non-native Spanish speaker, the fear of being misunderstood or mis-pronouncing a word can be paralysing. Members come along to our events with a whole host of questions, sometimes preferring to come and speak to us one-on-one at the break or follow up with us after the event. Everyone has their own preferences, however, being able to communicate in the local language helps to break down barriers and boosts audience participation by taking away these added pressures.</p>
<p>Additionally after running a number of these events, one of the key things we have learnt is how much content to cover in a day. Our LIVE locals are free to attend and open to the whole community. This however can mean that we have a very varied audience in terms of technical know-how and experience of working with our systems. At first we attempted to cover all we could, addressing as many needs, questions and uses of Crossref metadata that we could. However, creating content to please everyone is often a recipe for disaster and information overload. If you start to see your attendee’s eyes glaze over or they start answering emails on their smartphones, you’ve lost them.</p>
<p>Instead we are now going to tailor our events a little more, asking registrants questions in advance, and selecting specific topics to cover. Having a good range of distinct topics and presenters, including local guest speakers, also helps to maintain momentum and avoid audience fatigue. Wider information and conversations will then continue on our <a href="https://0-community-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">Community Forum</a> as well as events being supplemented by <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webinars/">webinars in local languages and timezones</a>.</p>
<h2 id="relationship-status-it-s-complicated">Relationship status: It’s complicated</h2>
<p>A question we are often asked when talking to members is how to link distinct content items in the metadata - whether this be a data-set to the published results, a preprint with the version of record, or a translated version of an article with the original.
Linking these related research outputs is extremely important; researchers need to be able to cite the correct version of the work they have used in their research. Creating a network of these linkages between scholarly outputs also helps ourselves, our members, and the wider community better track how research is used and developed.</p>
<p>English is by far the most common language used in international academic journals and often is required for publication, however the article can be published in two or more languages, enabling greater discovery and use of the research. A frequent question we get asked is how to register the two versions, whether they use the same DOI or whether each should be assigned its own identifier. Our <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426-Relationships-between-DOIs-and-other-objects">advice</a> is that each version of the article should have it’s own DOI for citation reasons, but should be linked in the metadata of the translated version as in the xml example below:</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/relationship-examaple-xml.png" alt="Relationship example xml" width="600px" />
</p>
<p>However, our schema covers far more relationship types than purely translations. Another interesting area of discussion which has become increasingly prevalent in the last couple of years is around preprints. We began supporting the registration of preprints in November 2016, using their specific content type and enabling linking in the metadata to the version of record, providing a clear publication history for accurate citation. Today we have <span class='withcommas'>136605</span>
registered in our system.</p>
<p>In Kyiv, we had a request to talk more about data citation; the importance of making data available and persistently linked to. Although data is often shared, it is not routinely referenced in the same way as journal articles or other publications, and this is something we want to encourage. When data is cited it provides clarity and context about the research underpinning the published article, as well as enabling greater discovery and re-use of that data in future research and publications. You can do this in two ways at Crossref, either by including data citations your reference lists, or, again, by using the relations section of the schema. If you want to learn more about the ‘how’ of data citation, we have some <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citation-what-and-how-for-publishers">useful guidance</a> you can take a look at.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/Otters.png" alt=“Meaningful connections like the otters" height="100px" width="300px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>As we are always saying Crossref is all about making connections. Linking research objects by capturing and declaring relationships within your metadata helps to map the evolution of research. Making the distinct parts of the research and publication process accessible by both readers and machines, enables wider discovery, re-use, transparency, accuracy of citations and provides greater acknowledgment of contributors.</p>
<h2 id="finding-solutions-to-resolutions">Finding Solutions to Resolutions</h2>
<p>Reports are rarely the things that get pulses racing (you should probably take a long, hard look at yourself if so) but they are important and can be very useful to make sure your content and the associated metadata is being registered correctly.</p>
<p>We often get questions from members who want to better understand their resolution reports. These are reports generated on a monthly basis for each DOI prefix, sent to the business contact for your organization, which provide statistics on the resolution rates of your content. So what do we mean by a resolution? Well simply, when a reader clicks on a DOI link for an article, that counts as one DOI resolution. No information is captured about the user or where they are coming from. Although we work to filter out computer-generated usage, the numbers are not a precise measure of human click-throughs to a publishers website - cached articles, search engine crawlers, and traffic directed through a library link resolver can be included in these numbers. However, the reports still provide a good idea of traffic to your publications via the DOI.</p>
<p>Often the part of the report which is of particular interest is the resolution failure rate. Although in an ideal world this would be 0%, realistically 2-3% is the norm. Publishers who are new to Crossref or who have created a small number of DOIs may have a higher failure percentage and this isn’t necessarily a problem (for example, a publisher with 1 failure and 9 successes will have a 10% failure rate). A .csv file containing a list of all failed DOI resolution attempts for the month is attached to each report so that you can review any significant number of failures or any dramatic changes which may indicate a problem that needs to be solved.</p>
<p><strong>Possible reasons for DOI failures:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Bad links - check that your DOI is directing readers to the correct location of your full text or landing page.</li>
<li>Undeposited DOIs - any DOIs that have been distributed or published should be deposited immediately. Simply adding a DOI to your content page will not automatically register this link.</li>
<li>Similarly, if your DOI was deposited mid-month and distributed earlier, any attempts prior to this date will appear as failures on your report.</li>
<li>User error - sometimes users can make mistakes when typing or copy-and-pasting DOIs. To minimise the risk of this keep your DOIs simple and short.<br /></li>
</ul>
<p>It is also important to make sure you keep the contact details we have on file for your organization up to date. Otherwise you might miss out on receiving important information about your account. Where it is possible we ask members to submit at least three separate contacts and review this regularly as people often move within and between organizations. We want to keep in touch to give you helpful, essential and interesting information (no spam!)</p>
<h2 id="get-involved">Get involved</h2>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/live-bangkok.jpg" alt=“LIVE Bangkok" height="125px" width="375px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>Our next LIVE local event will be held in Oakland, California on 19 September, <a href="https://crossrefoakland.eventbrite.com">registration is open</a> and spaces are still available. Alternatively you might want to sign up to one of our interactive <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webinars/">Metadata Manager webinars</a> to learn how to use our new content registration tool. Our plans for 2020 are still in the inception phase and we welcome any interest in collaboration, you can contact us at feedback@crossref.org or send us a message on the <a href="https://0-community-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/c/crossref-calendar">Community Forum</a>, where you can also keep up to date with our plans as well as giving us your feedback and suggestions. Speaking of feedback and, we have a survey which is trying to collect just that. Please <a href="https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5151355/cabad33fcc9b">let us know what you value about Crossref</a> (and what you don’t) - we’d love to hear your thoughts.</p>
<p><br/>
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<br/></p>
<hr />
2019 election slatehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2019-election-slate/
Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2019-election-slate/
<h2 id="2019-board-election">2019 Board Election</h2>
<p>The annual board election is a very important event for Crossref and its members. The board of directors, comprising 16 member organizations, governs Crossref, sets its strategic direction and makes sure that we fulfill our mission. Our members elect the board - its &ldquo;one member one vote&rdquo; - and we like to see as many members as possible voting. We are very pleased to announce the 2019 election slate - we have a great set of candidates and an update to the ByLaws addressing the composition of the slate to ensure that the board continues to be representative of our membership.</p>
<h2 id="2019-election-slate">2019 Election Slate</h2>
<p>Crossref received 52 expressions of interest this year through the link that was sent out via our blog, and over 100 emails from members interested in serving on our Board. It is very exciting to see that our members want to be involved.</p>
<p>In March of this year, the Board made a motion per the recommendation of an adhoc Governance Committee. It was resolves to &ldquo;provide the following guidance to the Nominating Committee: To achieve balance between revenue tiers by proposing a 2019 slate consisting of one Revenue Tier 1 seat and four Revenue tier 2 seats, and a 2020 slate consisting of four Revenue Tier 1 seats and two Revenue Tier 2 seats; thereby resulting in, as nearly as practicable, an equal balance between board members representing Revenue Tier 1 and Revenue Tier 2 (as those terms are defined in Crossref&rsquo;s ByLaws below).&rdquo;</p>
<p><em>Section 2.</em> Nominating Committee. The Board shall appoint a Nominating Committee of five (5) members, each of whom shall be either a Director or the designated representative of a member that is not represented on the Board, whose duty it shall be to nominate candidates for Directors to be elected at the next annual election. The Nominating Committee shall designate a slate of candidates for each election that is at least equal in number to the number of Directors to be elected at such election. Each such slate will be comprised such that, as nearly as practicable, one-half of the resulting Board shall be comprised of Directors designated by Members then representing Revenue Tier 1; and one-half of the resulting Board shall be comprised of Directors designated by Members then representing Revenue Tier 2. &ldquo;Revenue Tier 1&rdquo; means all consecutive membership dues categories, starting with the lowest dues category, that, when taken together, aggregate, as nearly as possible, to fifty percent (50%) of Crossref&rsquo;s annual revenue. &ldquo;Revenue Tier 2&rdquo; means all membership dues categories above Revenue Tier 1. The Nominating Committee shall notify the Secretary in writing, at least twenty (20) days before the date of the annual meeting, of the names of such candidates, and the Secretary, except as herein otherwise provided, shall transmit a copy thereof to the last recorded address of each member of record simultaneously with the notice of the meeting.</p>
<p>The Committee and the Board has worked very hard to balance the Board, so you will see two categories on the ballot, large and small.</p>
<h2 id="the-2019-slate-includes-seven-candidates-for-five-available-seats">The 2019 slate includes: seven candidates for five available seats</h2>
<p>Candidate organizations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (1 seat available):</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>eLife</strong>, Melissa Harrison</li>
<li><strong>The Royal Society</strong>, Stuart Taylor</li>
</ul>
<p>Candidate organizations, in alphabetical order, for the Large category (4 seats available):</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Clarivate Analytics</strong>, Nandita Quaderi</li>
<li><strong>Elsevier</strong>, Chris Shillum</li>
<li><strong>IOP</strong>, Graham McCann</li>
<li><strong>Springer Nature</strong>, Reshma Shaikh</li>
<li><strong>Wiley</strong>, Todd Toler</li>
</ul>
<div class="blue-highlight">
<span><h3 id="take-a-look-at-the-candidates-organizational-and-personal-statements-board-and-governance-elections-2019-slate"><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/elections/2019-slate/">Take a look at the candidates&rsquo; organizational and personal statements</a></h3></span>
</div>
<h2 id="you-can-be-part-of-this-important-process-by-voting-in-the-election">You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election</h2>
<p>If your organization is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 13, 2019, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 27, 2019.</p>
<h2 id="how-can-you-vote">How can you vote?</h2>
<p>On September 27, 2018, your organization&rsquo;s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.</p>
<p>The election results will be announced at <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual/">LIVE19 Amsterdam</a> on November 13, 2019.</p>
Building better metadata with schema releaseshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/building-better-metadata-with-schema-releases/
Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Patricia Feeneyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/building-better-metadata-with-schema-releases/<p>This month we have officially released a new version of our input metadata schema. As well as walking through the latest additions, I&rsquo;ll also describe here how we&rsquo;re starting to develop a new streamlined and open approach to schema development, using GitLab and some of the ideas under discussion going forward.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-included-in-version-4-4-2">What&rsquo;s included in version 4.4.2</h2>
<p>The latest schema as of August 2019 is version 4.4.2 and this release now includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Support for &ldquo;<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/pending-publication/">pending publication</a>&ldquo;</li>
<li>Support for JATS 1.2 abstracts</li>
<li>Abstract support to dissertations, reports, and allow multiple abstracts wherever available</li>
<li>Support for multiple dissertation authors</li>
<li>A new <code>acceptance_date</code> element added to journal article, book, book chapter, and conference paper content types</li>
</ul>
<p>&ldquo;Pending publication&rdquo; is the term we&rsquo;ve coined for the phase where a manuscript has been accepted for publication but where the publisher needs to communicate a DOI much earlier than most article metadata is available. Some members asked for the ability to register and assign DOIs prior to online publication, even without a title, so this allows members to register a DOI with minimal metadata, temporarily, before online publication. There is of course no obligation to use this feature.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s worth calling out the addition of <code>acceptance_date</code> too. This is a key attribute that is heavily requested by downstream metadata users like universities. Acceptance dates allow people to report on outputs much more accurately, so we do encourage all members to start including acceptance dates in their metadata. It&rsquo;s highly appreciated!</p>
<h2 id="schema-files-public-on-gitlab">Schema files public on GitLab</h2>
<p>I’ve added our latest schema to a new <a href="https://gitlab.com/crossref/schema">GitLab repository</a>, There you’ll find the schema files, some documentation, and the opportunity to suggest enhancements. The schema has been released as bundle <a href="https://gitlab.com/crossref/schema/-/releases">0.1.1</a> and also includes our new Grant metadata schema for members that fund research.</p>
<p>The schema has been available in some form for months but at this point we consider it ‘officially’ released to kick off our new but necessary practice of formal schema releases. Any forthcoming updates will be added to the next version.</p>
<h2 id="schema-management-process">Schema management process</h2>
<p>We’ve been adding sets of metadata and new content types over the years, but also need to have a defined process for small but vital pieces of metadata that you need to provide and retrieve from our metadata records. If you’re wondering what our procedure for updating our schema is, you are not alone! We have not had a formal process, instead relying on ad-hoc requests from our membership and working groups. Our release management and schema numbering has also not been consistent.</p>
<p>Going forward, I will ensure that all forthcoming versions of our metadata schema are be posted as a draft on GitLab for review and comment, and the final version will be officially released via GitLab as well.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s important to note that when we talk about &ldquo;the schema&rdquo;, we generally mean the <em>input</em> schema specifically i.e. what members of Crossref can register about the content they produce. As always, the output for retrieving that metadata is subject to separate development plans for our Metadata APIs. I&rsquo;m working with our technical team so we can develop and introduce an &lsquo;end-to-end&rsquo; approach that doesn&rsquo;t in future treat the input and the output as such separate considerations.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-next">What&rsquo;s next</h2>
<p>Many of the updates in this latest release have been in the works for some time. Changes to our metadata both large and small are considered carefully, but I’d like to do this in a transparent and cooperative way with our community.</p>
<p>I recently set up the &ldquo;Metadata Practitioners Interest Group&rdquo; and we&rsquo;ve just had our second call. A big topic was how to best manage the ideas and requests from the community. The ability for public comments on GitLab is a first step.</p>
<p>This most recent update contains a mix of long term projects and updates to keep our metadata current and useful. Other changes that are under discussion will require more development on our end. But stay tuned for more information about forthcoming changes, as well information about how you can contribute.</p>Introducing our new Director of Producthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/introducing-our-new-director-of-product/
Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/introducing-our-new-director-of-product/<p>I&rsquo;m happy to announce that <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/bryan-vickery">Bryan Vickery</a> has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor &amp; Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&amp;F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.</p>
<p>He previously held a range of roles from Publisher to Chief Operations Officer at BioMedCentral, as well as online community and technology leadership roles at Elsevier.</p>
<p>Bryan is a great addition to Crossref and we are lucky to have him. The product team is keen to progress the long list of wishes from our community with his guidance. Bryan will bring focus and clarity to our roadmap and our development processes, making it easier for people to adopt and participate in our services, and ensuring that we are working on the issues that are most important to our members.</p>
<p>He will also be a vital part of the leadership team, working with me and the other directors Geoffrey, Ginny, and Lisa to help us take the organization forward in a transparent way that serves our mission and empowers our excellent staff.</p>
<h2 id="and-now-a-few-words-from-bryan">And now a few words from Bryan…</h2>
<p>I’m thrilled to be joining Crossref as Director of Product at a time of considerable change in scholarly communication. I’ve worked in, and around, scholarly publishing for more than 20 years.</p>
<p>This is a challenging role. We have many exciting services and collaborations to progress, and also technical debt to address (like everyone else) to upgrade our existing services - it’s essential we balance these. My priority is to stay on top of the issues of the highest value to the scholarly community, now and in the future, and ensure we deliver services that are both useful and usable.</p>
<p>I will be attending Crossref LIVE19 “The strategy one” along with other staff and look forward to meeting many of our members then. In the meantime, I&rsquo;d love to hear your thoughts on where we’ve been (what it’s like working with us and using our services) and where we&rsquo;re going (what you’d like to see from us). You can <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org?subject=Product feedback for Bryan">reach me via our feedback email</a>.</p>
<p><em>Please join us in welcoming Bryan to the Crossref community.</em></p>We'll be rocking your world again at PIDapalooza 2020https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/well-be-rocking-your-world-again-at-pidapalooza-2020/
Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/well-be-rocking-your-world-again-at-pidapalooza-2020/<p>The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It&rsquo;s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee&mdash;Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I&mdash;are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!</p>
<p><div class="align-right">
<span><div style="width:195px; text-align:center;" ><iframe src="https://www.eventbrite.com/countdown-widget?eid=60971406117" frameborder="0" height="212" width="195" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true"></iframe><div style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial; font-size:12px; padding:10px 0 5px; margin:2px; width:195px; text-align:center;" ></div></div></span>
</div>
We have a shiny <a href="https://pidapalooza.org">new website</a>, with loads more information than before, including spotify playlists (please add your PID songs to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1oJtbpTzF9I3MewQ1Yasml?si=D0TKdR8BTJSL-GA3X_LwVQ">the 2020 one</a>!), an instagram photo gallery, and of course registration information. Look out for updates there and on <a href="https://twitter.com/pidapalooza">Twitter</a>.</p>
<p>And, led by Helena, the Program Committee is starting its search for sessions that meet PIDapalooza’s goals of being PID-focused, <strong>fun</strong>, informative, and interactive. If you’ve a PID story to share, a PID practice to recommend, or a PID technology to launch, the Committee wants to hear from you. Please send them your ideas, using <a href="https://forms.gle/oeSeiZEni3cPipKm6">this form</a>, by September 27. We aim to finalize the program by late October/early November.</p>
<h2 id="don-t-forget-to-tie-your-proposal-into-one-of-the-six-festival-themes">Don’t forget to tie your proposal into one of the six festival themes:</h2>
<h4 id="theme-1-putting-principles-into-practice">Theme 1: Putting Principles into Practice</h4>
<p>FAIR, Plan S, the 4 Cs; principles are everywhere. Do you have examples of how PIDs helped you put principles into practice? We’d love to hear your story!</p>
<h4 id="theme-2-pid-communities">Theme 2: PID Communities</h4>
<p>We believe PIDs don’t work without community around them. We would like to hear from you about best practice among PID communities so we can learn from each other and spread the word even further!</p>
<h4 id="theme-3-pid-success-stories">Theme 3: PID Success Stories</h4>
<p>We already know PIDs are great, but which strategies worked? Share your victories! Which strategies failed? Let’s turn these into success stories together!</p>
<h4 id="theme-4-achieving-persistence-through-sustainability">Theme 4: Achieving Persistence through Sustainability</h4>
<p>Persistence is a key part of PIDs, but there can’t be persistence without sustainability. Do you want to share how you sustain your PIDs or how PIDs help you with sustainability?</p>
<h4 id="theme-5-bridging-worlds-social-and-technical">Theme 5: Bridging Worlds - Social and Technical</h4>
<p>What would make heterogeneous PID systems &lsquo;interoperate&rsquo; optimally? Would standardized metadata and APIs across PID types solve many of the problems, and if so, how would that be achieved? And what about the social aspects? How do we bridge the gaps between different stakeholder groups and communities?</p>
<h4 id="theme-6-pid-party">Theme 6: PID Party!</h4>
<p>You don’t just learn about PIDs through powerpoints. What about games? Interpretive dance? Get creative and let us know what kind of activity you’d like to organize at PIDapalooza this year!</p>
<h2 id="pidapalooza-the-essentials">PIDapalooza: the essentials</h2>
<p><strong>What?</strong> <a href="https://pidapalooza.org">PIDapalooza 2020</a> - the open festival of persistent identifiers<br />
<strong>When?</strong> 29-30 January 2020 (kickoff party the evening of January 28)<br />
<strong>Where?</strong> Belem Cultural Center, Lisbon, Portugal (<a href="https://goo.gl/maps/HEmmQUjkJcEoqFTZ7">map</a>)<br />
<strong>Why?</strong> To think, talk, live persistent identifiers for two whole days with your fellow PID people, experts, and newcomers alike!</p>
<p>We hope you’re as excited about PIDapalooza 2020 as we are and we look forward to seeing you in Lisbon.</p>LIVE19, the strategy one: have your sayhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/live19-the-strategy-one-have-your-say/
Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/live19-the-strategy-one-have-your-say/
<p>With a smaller group than usual, we&rsquo;re dedicating this year&rsquo;s annual meeting to hear what you value about Crossref. Which initiatives would you put first and/or last? Where would you have us draw the line between mission and ambition? What is “core” for you? How could/should we adapt for the future in order to meet your needs?
<div class="align-right">
<span><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/community-images/crossref-live-19-logo copy.jpg" alt="Crossref LIVE19 logo" width="200px" /></span>
</div></p>
<h2 id="striving-for-balance">Striving for balance</h2>
<p>Different people want different things from us. As Aristotle said: <em>&ldquo;There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.&rdquo;</em> As we prepare for our 20th year of operation, please join this unique meeting to help shape the future of Crossref.</p>
<p>There won&rsquo;t be any plenary talks about trends in scholarly communications, but instead workshop-style activities to help hone our strategy, do some scenario planning, and prioritize goals together, as a community.</p>
<h2 id="have-your-say">Have your say</h2>
<p>Whether you can make it in person or not, you can still pitch in by giving us your opinion in advance. We&rsquo;re gathering broad input on what you think we&rsquo;re doing well, whether we&rsquo;re on the right track strategically, and how we can improve. There&rsquo;s never been such a comprehensive study of what value we offer so we hope to learn a lot and will adjust plans based on the results.
<br>
<div class="blue-highlight">
<span>Please take the &ldquo;<a href="https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5151355/blog">Value of Crossref</a>&rdquo; survey. It&rsquo;ll take 10-12 minutes.</span>
</div></p>
<h2 id="at-the-meeting">At the meeting</h2>
<p>Please join us at the Tobacco Theater in central Amsterdam on the afternoon of 13th November from 12:30 pm and for the full day of 14th November. The first afternoon will involve some scene-setting talks with key information you&rsquo;ll need for the following day&rsquo;s workshops, including the results of the survey above. There will also be some announcements, including who members have voted onto our board (this year&rsquo;s slate is yet to be communicated), and of course plenty of time for discussion and questions among peers.</p>
<div class="align-right">
<span><div style="width:195px; text-align:center;" ><iframe src="https://www.eventbrite.com/countdown-widget?eid=60251255126" frameborder="0" height="374" width="195" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true"></iframe><div style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial; font-size:12px; padding:10px 0 5px; margin:2px; width:195px; text-align:center;" ></div></div></span>
</div>
<p>In addition to the results of the survey, during the meeting each participant will be furnished with a &lsquo;fact pack&rsquo; to reference in their discussions and recommendations. It will include answers to questions like <code>who pays to keep Crossref sustainable?</code>. I&rsquo;m looking forward to busting some myths on that one! Everyone will be pre-assigned to a particular table/topic (like a wedding!) and will stay in those groups for roundtable discussions. There will be a community facilitator and a staff member on each table. You will be able to mingle more widely in the breaks and the evening drinks reception on the 13th.</p>
<p>Based on this provided data, we&rsquo;ll be asking participants to think about key questions such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Who, ultimately, does Crossref serve?</li>
<li>What should Crossref&rsquo;s product development priorities be?</li>
<li>What (if anything) would be missed if Crossref went away? (i.e. what&rsquo;s our central value)</li>
<li>What does &lsquo;community&rsquo; really mean and how should Crossref work to better balance opposing priorities?</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>Research is global, and supporting a diverse global community is a challenge. Come and have your say. <a href="http://crossreflive19.eventbrite.com">Register today</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I can&rsquo;t wait to see you there and hear your thoughts.</p>
Funders and infrastructure: let’s get buildinghttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/funders-and-infrastructure-lets-get-building/
Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000Josh Brownhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/funders-and-infrastructure-lets-get-building/<p>Human intelligence and curiosity are the lifeblood of the scholarly world, but not many people can afford to pursue research out of their own pocket. We all have bills to pay. Also, compute time, buildings, lab equipment, administration, and <a href="https://fap-dep.web.cern.ch/rpc/2019-annual-contributions-cern-budget">giant underground thingumatrons do not come cheap</a>. In 2017, according to statistics from <a href="https://en.unesco.org/">UNESCO</a>, <a href="http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-development-spending/">$1.7 trillion dollars</a> were invested globally in Research and Development. A lot of this money comes from the public - <a href="http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SCN_DS&amp;lang=en">22c in every dollar </a>spent on R&amp;D in the USA comes from government funds, for example. Funders really do support a LOT of research.</p>
<p>For that research to count, it needs to be communicated. For us to interpret those research communications critically, we need to understand how the research was done and <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/disguising-corporate-influence-science-about-sugar-and-health">who paid</a> for it.</p>
<p>At Crossref, we’ve been working with funders for many years. The <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/funder-registry/">Open Funder Registry</a> was launched (with donated support from <a href="https://0-www-elsevier-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/">Elsevier</a>) in 2012, and provides a taxonomy of funders, each uniquely identified, which has grown to cover 20,000 funders around the world. This resource has helped to connect the organizations that provide research funds to resources, projects, and publications. Some are also members and have been registering content with us. This is a growing trend as more funders start to launch their own <a href="https://amrcopenresearch.org/">open platforms</a>. Funders also consume metadata from Crossref members, using it to track and report on the published outputs of the researchers they support.</p>
<p>More recently, we have been exploring the ways that we can do more in partnership with the funding community. As our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/">board</a> concluded in 2017, “Crossref requires increased emphasis on funders, understanding their needs and requirements and increasingly including funders in the scholarly communication dialogue.” In response, we have explored new services and practical enhancements to our existing portfolio, such as the new grant ID registration system, which will also power search and lookup tools.</p>
<p>This new initiative will link <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/grantID-schema">structured information about grants</a> with DOIs, and enable us to provide open tools to help institutions, publishers, and research supporting organizations to re-use that data and make long-lasting connections between specific funding (and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/">other kinds of research support</a>) and research activities and outcomes. The value of this was beautifully explained by our friends at <a href="https://wellcome.ac.uk/">Wellcome</a> (now members) in this <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/wellcome-explains-the-benefits-of-developing-an-open-and-global-grant-identifier/">blog post</a>, and was reinforced by a recent survey undertaken by ORCID in which linking grants to outputs was cited as one of the major challenges facing funders. The Grant IDs project launched this July with a group of early adopter funders, ably supported by the team at <a href="https://europepmc.org/">Europe PMC</a>.</p>
<p>We’re not stopping there though: we are lucky to have a dedicated and engaged <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/funders/">funder advisory group</a>, and we will continue to work with them to understand how our interactions with funders can benefit the wider ecosystem that we support, and help funders to achieve their goals.</p>
<p>There are many platforms providing vital intelligence to funders, from <a href="https://www.dimensions.ai/">Dimensions</a> to <a href="https://www.openaire.eu/">OpenAIRE</a>, which rely on Crossref data. Last month, I was at the <a href="https://indico.cern.ch/event/786048/">OAI11 workshop</a> in <a href="https://www.geneve.com/">Geneva</a>, and it was striking how many presentations included a slide that mentioned using Crossref data. There were 200 people from the open science community there, and they clearly rely on Crossref as a <a href="https://cameronneylon.net/blog/where-are-the-pipes-building-foundational-infrastructures-for-future-services/">foundational infrastructure</a> to build their ecosystem. That community is also just a subset of the more than 2,500 registered consumers of Crossref metadata. We need to keep asking how this metadata can improve the information available to funders, to their partners and to service providers. Adding grants to the mix will help all of these parties provide an even richer picture of research.</p>
<p>As we move forward with our engagement with the global funding community, new opportunities are becoming visible, and not just for funders. Better experiences for authors, reduced overhead for publishers and easier benchmarking for institutions are a selection of benefits that this work can help us realize.</p>
<p>When we really start to get to grips with opening up information about the inputs to research in the way we already have with its outputs, truly exciting things can happen. The really great thing about this is that, quite literally, everyone benefits: from Crossref members to everyone touched by advances in our understanding of the world. Let’s get building!</p>
Big things have small beginnings: the growth of the Open Funder Registryhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/big-things-have-small-beginnings-the-growth-of-the-open-funder-registry/
Sun, 21 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000Kirsty Meddingshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/big-things-have-small-beginnings-the-growth-of-the-open-funder-registry/
<p>The <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/funder-registry/">Open Funder Registry</a> plays a critical role in making sure that our members correctly identify the funding sources behind the research that they are publishing. It addresses a similar problem to the one that led to the creation of <a href="http://orcid.org">ORCID</a>: researchers&rsquo; names are hard to disambiguate and are rarely unique; they get abbreviated, have spelling variations and change over time.</p>
<p>The same is true of organizations. You don’t have to read all that many papers to see authors acknowledge funding from the US National Institutes of Health as NIH, National Institutes for Health, National Institute of Health, etc. And wait, are you sure they didn’t mean National Institute for Health Research? (An entirely separate UK-based funder).</p>
<p>And a lot of countries have a National Science Foundation…</p>
<p>If each funder has a unique identifier, our members can <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration/funding-data/">include it in the metadata</a> that they register with us, giving a clear and accurate link between the funder of the research and the published outcomes. And we can make that information available to everyone via our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/rest-api/">API</a>, and build <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/funding">human interfaces</a> so that you can look it up.</p>
<p>Many types of funding bodies are represented in the Funder Registry, from government agencies and large international foundations to small single-mission charities, and everything in between. As well as a unique DOI for each institution, the Registry contains additional metadata that can help to identify the funder such as country, abbreviated or alternate names, translated names, and so on.</p>
<p>The Registry also supports relationships between different funders. These can be hierarchical parent/child relationships for larger organizations, or connections between archival and current entries in instances where a funder has changed its name or become part of another body (to tell us about these kinds of changes you just need to <a href="mailto:funder.registry@crossref.org">get in touch</a>).</p>
<p>The Registry was donated to Crossref by Elsevier when we first introduced funding information as part of our content registration schema back in 2012. We started out with a list of just over 4000 funders. Through an ongoing partnership the list has been - and continues to be - updated on a monthly basis by Elsevier, and sent to Crossref as a formatted XML file that we process and release.</p>
<p>In return, Crossref sends Elsevier a feed of funder names that our members have registered with us that are not present in the Registry, which a team at Elsevier validates and adds to their databases, and then puts those newly-identified funders in to the next iteration of the list they send to us. It’s nice and circular and benefits both parties.</p>
<h3 id="we-released-v1-27-of-the-funder-registry-https-github-com-crossref-open-funder-registry-last-week-and-it-contains-entries-for-an-impressive-21-356-funders">We released <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/open-funder-registry">v1.27 of the Funder Registry</a> last week, and it contains entries for an impressive 21,356 funders.</h3>
<p>I’ve been involved in this project since its inception, and have enjoyed a productive and cooperative working relationship with the team at Elsevier, headed by Peter Berkvens (Senior Product Manager) and Paul Mostert (Director Product Management). I asked them to explain a little about the process from their side:</p>
<p>“Our team maintains a workflow in which Acknowledgement and Funding sections from articles are scanned for appearances of funding organizations using Natural Language Processing techniques. External Elsevier vendors then edit the data and add the validated names of the funders to what is called the Funding Bodies Taxonomy. The latter feeds Crossref’s Open Funder Registry.</p>
<p>Currently, the Taxonomy is nearing 22,000 Funders. It is expected it will grow to 25,000 Funders eventually. When this stage is reached, Elsevier believes that all existing Funders will be covered in the Funder Registry. Elsevier will continue to maintain the list adding new Funders as soon as they appear in scientific papers.</p>
<p>Elsevier’s Primary Articles production workflow for ScienceDirect uses the Funder Registry during the copyediting process, validating and tagging the Funders that appear in the accepted articles for Elsevier journals hosted by ScienceDirect. We then send the funder names and IDs to Crossref as part of our metadata.”</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone involved for getting us ever-closer to a truly comprehensive list of funders.</p>
<p>And if you’re a member who’s not already registering funding information, why not look into <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration/funding-data/">getting started?</a> It all leads to richer metadata which means more people can find, cite and re-use research &ndash; and we all know that’s a <a href="https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/06/11/better-metadata-could-help-save-the-world/">good thing</a>&hellip;</p>
What if I told you that bibliographic references can be structured?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-if-i-told-you-that-bibliographic-references-can-be-structured/
Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000Dominika Tkaczykhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-if-i-told-you-that-bibliographic-references-can-be-structured/<p>Last year I spent several weeks studying how to automatically match unstructured references to DOIs (you can read about these experiments in <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/reference-matching-for-real-this-time/">my previous blog posts</a>). But what about references that are not in the form of an unstructured string, but rather a structured collection of metadata fields? Are we matching them, and how? Let&rsquo;s find out.</p>
<h2 id="tl-dr">TL;DR</h2>
<ul>
<li>43% of open/limited references deposited with Crossref have no publisher-asserted DOI and no unstructured string. This means they need a matching approach suitable for structured references.</li>
<li>I adapted our new matching algorithms: Search-Based Matching (SBM) and Search-Based Matching with Validation (SMBV) to work with both structured and unstructured references.</li>
<li>I compared three matching algorithms: Crossref&rsquo;s current (legacy) algorithm, SBM and SBMV, using a dataset of 2,000 structured references randomly chosen from Crossref&rsquo;s references.</li>
<li>SBMV and the legacy algorithm performed almost the same. SBMV&rsquo;s F1 was slightly better (0.9660 vs. 0.9593).</li>
<li>Similarly as in the case of unstructured references, SBMV achieved slightly lower precision and better recall than the legacy algorithm.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
<p>Those of you who often read scientific papers are probably used to bibliographic references in the form of unstructured strings, as they appear in the bibliography, for example:</p>
<pre><code>[5] Elizabeth Lundberg, “Humanism on Gallifrey,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, p. 382, 2013.
</code></pre>
<p>This form, however, is not the only way we can store the information about the referenced paper. An alternative is a structured, more machine-readable form, for example using BibTeX format:</p>
<pre><code>@article{Elizabeth_Lundberg_2013,
year = 2013,
publisher = {{SF}-{TH}, Inc.},
volume = {40},
number = {2},
pages = {382},
author = {Elizabeth Lundberg},
title = {Humanism on Gallifrey},
journal = {Science Fiction Studies}
}
</code></pre>
<p>Probably the most concise way to provide the information about the referenced document is to use its identifier, for example (🥁drum roll&hellip;) the DOI:</p>
<pre><code>&lt;https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5621/sciefictstud.40.2.0382&gt;
</code></pre>
<p>It is important to understand that these three representations (DOI, structured reference and unstructured reference) are not equivalent. The amount of information they carry varies:</p>
<ul>
<li>The DOI, by definition, provides the full information about the referenced document, because it identifies it without a doubt. Even though the metadata and content are not directly present in the DOI string, they can be easily and deterministically accessed. It is by far the preferred representation of the referenced document.</li>
<li>The structured reference contains the metadata of the referenced object, but it doesn&rsquo;t identify the referenced object without a doubt. In our example, we know that the paper was published in 2013 by Elizabeth Lundberg, but we might not know exactly which paper it is, especially if there are more than one document with the same or similar metadata.</li>
<li>The unstructured reference contains the metadata field values, but without the names of the fields. This also doesn&rsquo;t identify the referenced document, and even its metadata is not known without a doubt. In our example, we know that the word “Science” appears somewhere in the metadata, but we don&rsquo;t know for sure whether it is a part of the title, journal title, or maybe the author&rsquo;s (very cool) name.</li>
</ul>
<p>The diagram presents the relationships between all these three forms:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/structured_matching_reference_forms.png"
alt="reference forms" width="800px"/>
</figure>
<p><br/></p>
<p>The arrows show actions that Crossref has to perform to transform one form to another.</p>
<p>Green transformations are in general easy and can be done without introducing any errors. The reason is that green arrows go from more information to less information. We all know how easy it is to forget important stuff!</p>
<p>Green transformations are typically performed when the publication is being created. At the beginning the author can access the DOI of the referenced document, because they know exactly which document it is. Then, they can extract the bibliographic metadata (the structured form) of the document based on the DOI, for example by following the DOI to the document&rsquo;s webpage or retrieving the metadata from <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc">Crossref&rsquo;s REST API</a>. Finally, the structured form can be formatted into an unstructured string using, for example, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteProc">CiteProc</a> tool.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve also automated it further and these two green transformation (getting the document&rsquo;s metadata based on the DOI and formatting it into a string) can be done in one go using <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/labs/citation-formatting-service/">Crossref&rsquo;s content negotiation</a>.</p>
<p>Red transformations are often done in systems that store bibliographic metadata (like our own metadata collection), often at a large scale. In these systems, we typically want to have DOIs (or other unique identifiers) of the referenced documents, but in practise we often have only structured and/or unstructured form. To fix this, we match references. Some systems also perform reference parsing (thankfully, we discovered <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/labs/resolving-citations-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-parser/">we do not need to do this in our case</a>).</p>
<p>In general, red transformations are difficult, because we have to go from less information to more information, effectively recreating the information that has been lost during paper writing. This requires a bit of reasoning, educated guessing, and juggling probabilities. Data errors, noise, and sparsity make the situation even more dire. As a result, we do not expect any matching or parsing algorithm to be always correct. Instead, we perform evaluations (like in this blog post) to capture how well they perform on average.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/reference-matching-for-real-this-time/">previous blog post</a> focused on matching unstructured references to DOIs (long red &ldquo;matching&rdquo; arrow). In this one, I analyse how well we can match structured references to DOIs (short red &ldquo;matching&rdquo; arrow).</p>
<h2 id="references-in-crossref">References in Crossref</h2>
<p>You might be asking yourself how important it is to have the matching algorithm working for both structured and unstructured references. Let&rsquo;s look more closely at the references our matching algorithm has to deal with.</p>
<p>29% of open/limited references deposited with Crossref already have the DOI provided by the publisher member. At Crossref, when we come across those references, we start dancing on a rainbow to the tunes of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkin_Park">Linkin Park</a>, while the references holding their DOIs sprinkle from the sky. Some of us sing along. We live for those moments, so if you care about us, please provide as many DOIs in your references as possible!</p>
<p>You might be wondering how we are sure these publisher-provided DOIs are correct. The short answer is that we are not. After all, the publisher might have used an automated matcher to insert the DOIs before depositing the metadata. Nevertheless, our current workflow assumes these publisher-provided DOIs are correct and we simply accept them as they are.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the remaining 71% of references are deposited without a DOI. Those are the references we try to match ourselves.</p>
<p>Here is the distribution of all the open/limited references:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/structured_matching_reference_distribution.png"
alt="reference distibution" width="600px"/>
</figure>
<p>17% of the references are deposited with no DOI and both structured and unstructured form. 11% have no DOI and only an unstructured form, and 43% have no DOI and only a structured form. These 43% cannot be directly processed by the unstructured matching algorithm.</p>
<p>This distribution clearly shows that we need a matching algorithm able to process both structured and unstructured references. If our algorithm worked only with one type, we would miss a large percentage of the input references, and the quality of our citation metadata would be questionable.</p>
<h2 id="the-analysis">The analysis</h2>
<p>Let&rsquo;s get to the point. I evaluated and compared three matching algorithms, focusing on the structured references.</p>
<p>The first algorithm is one of the legacy algorithms currently used in Crossref. It uses fuzzy querying in a relational database to find the best matching DOI for the given structured reference. It can be accessed through a <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214880143-OpenURL%23openurl2">Crossref OpenURL</a> query.</p>
<p>The second algorithm is an adaptation of the Search-Based Matching (SBM) algorithm for structured references. In this algorithm, we concatenate all metadata fields of the reference and use it to search in the Crossref&rsquo;s REST API. The first hit is returned as the target DOI if its relevance score exceeds the predefined threshold.</p>
<p>The third algorithm is an adaptation of the Search-Based Matching with Validation (SBMV) for structured references. Similarly as in the case of SBM, we also concatenate all metadata fields of the input reference and use it to search in the <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc">Crossref&rsquo;s REST API</a>. Next, a number of top hits are considered as candidates and their similarity score with the input reference is calculated. The candidate with the highest similarity score is returned as the target DOI if its score exceeds the predefined threshold. The similarity score is based on fuzzy comparison of the metadata field values between the candidate and the input reference.</p>
<p>I compared these three algorithms on a test set composed of 2,000 structured bibliographic references randomly chosen from Crossref&rsquo;s metadata. For each reference, I manually checked the output of all matching algorithms, and in some cases performed additional manual searching. This resulted in the true target DOI (or null) assigned to each reference.</p>
<p>The metrics are the same as in the previous evaluations: precision, recall and F1 calculated over the set of input references.</p>
<p>The thresholds for SBM and SBMV algorithms were chosen on a separate validation dataset. The validation dataset also contains 2,000 structured references with manually-verified target DOIs.</p>
<h2 id="the-results">The results</h2>
<p>The plot shows the results of the evaluation of all three algorithms:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/structured_matching_results.png"
alt="structured matching evaluation results" width="600px"/>
</figure>
<p><br/></p>
<p>The vertical black lines on top of the bars represent the confidence intervals.</p>
<p>As we can see, SBMV and the legacy approach achieved very similar results. SBMV slightly outperforms the legacy approach in F1: 0.9660 vs. 0.9593.</p>
<p>SBMV is slightly worse that the legacy approach in precision (0.9831 vs. 0.9929) and better in recall (0.9495 vs. 0.9280).</p>
<p>The SBM algorithm performs the worst, especially in precision. Why is there such a huge difference between SBM and SBMV? The algorithms differ in the post-processing validation stage. SBM relies on the ability of the search engine to select the best target DOI, while SBMV re-scores a number of candidates obtained from the search engine using custom similarity. The results here suggest that in the case of structured references, the right target DOI is usually somewhere close to the top of the search results, but often it is not in the first position. One of the reasons might be missing titles in 76% of the structured references, which can confuse the search engine.</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s look more closely at a few interesting cases in our test set:</p>
<pre><code>first-page = 1000
article-title = Sequence capture using PCR-generated probes: a cost-effective method of targeted high-throughput sequencing for nonmodel organisms
volume = 14
author = Peñalba
year = 2014
journal-title = Molecular Ecology Resources
</code></pre>
<p>The reference above was successfully matched by SBMV to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1111/1755-0998.12249">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1111/1755-0998.12249</a>, even though the document&rsquo;s volume and pages are missing from Crossref&rsquo;s metadata.</p>
<pre><code>issue = 2
first-page = 101
volume = 6
author = Abraham
year = 1987
journal-title = Promoter: An Automated Promotion Evaluation System
</code></pre>
<p>Here the structure incorrectly labels article title as journal title. Despite this, the reference was correctly matched by our brave SBMV to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1287/mksc.6.2.101">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1287/mksc.6.2.101</a>.</p>
<pre><code>author = Marshall Day C.
volume = 39
first-page = 572
year = 1949
journal-title = India. J. A. D. A.
</code></pre>
<p>Above we have most likely a parsing error. A part of the article title appears in the journal name, and the main journal name is abbreviated. ‘I see what you did there, my old friend Parsing Algorithm! Only a minor obstacle!&rsquo; said SBMV, and matched the reference to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14219/jada.archive.1949.0114">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14219/jada.archive.1949.0114</a>.</p>
<pre><code>volume = 5
year = 2015
article-title = A retrospective analysis of the effect of discussion in teleconference and face-to-face scientific peer-review panels
journal-title = BMJ Open
</code></pre>
<p>Here the the page number and author are not in the structure, but our invincible SBMV jumped over the holes left by the missing metadata and gracefully grabbed the right DOI <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-009138">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-009138</a>.</p>
<pre><code>issue = 2
first-page = 533
volume = 30
author = Uthman BM
year = 1989
journal-title = Epilepsia
</code></pre>
<p>In this case we have a mismatch in the page number (“533” vs. “S33”). But did SBMV give up and burst into tears? I think we already know the answer! Of course, it conquered the nasty typo with the sword made of fuzzy comparisons (yes, it&rsquo;s a thing!) and brought us back the correct DOI <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1111/j.1528-1157.1989.tb05823.x">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1111/j.1528-1157.1989.tb05823.x</a>.</p>
<h2 id="structured-vs-unstructured">Structured vs. unstructured</h2>
<p>How does matching structured references compare to matching unstructured references?</p>
<p>The general trends are the same. For both structured and unstructured references, SBMV outperforms the legacy approach in F1, achieving worse precision and better recall. This tells us that our legacy algorithms are more strict and as a result they miss some links.</p>
<p>Structured reference matching seems easier than unstructured reference matching. The reason is that when we have the structure, we can compare the input reference to the candidate field by field, which is more precise than using the unstructured string.</p>
<p>Structured matching, however, in practise brings new challenges. One big problem is data sparsity. 15% of structured references without DOIs have fewer than four metadata fields. This is not always enough to identify the DOI. Also, 76% of the structured references without DOIs do not contain the article title, which poses a problem for candidate selection using the search engine.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-next">What&rsquo;s next?</h2>
<p>So far, I have focused on evaluating SBMV for unstructured and structured references separately. 17% of the open/limited references at Crossref, however, have both unstructured and structured form. In those cases, it might be beneficial to use the information from both forms. I plan to perform some experiments on this soon.</p>
<p>The data and code for this evaluation can be found at <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation">https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation</a>. The Java version of SBMV (for both structured and unstructured references) can be found at <a href="https://gitlab.com/crossref/search-based-reference-matcher">https://gitlab.com/crossref/search-based-reference-matcher</a>.</p>License metadata FTWhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/license-metadata-ftw/
Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/license-metadata-ftw/<p>More and better license information is at the top of a lot of Christmas lists from a lot of research institutions and others who regularly use Crossref metadata. I know, I normally just ask for socks too. To help explain what we mean by this, we&rsquo;ve collaborated with <a href="https://www.jisc.ac.uk/">Jisc</a> to set out some guidance for publishers on registering this license metadata with us.</p>
<p>At the most basic level, complete and accurate license metadata helps anyone interested in using a research work out how they can do so. Making the information machine-readable helps this to be done easily and at scale by all kinds of tools and services.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/license-best-practice/">In this best practice guide</a>, we’re specifically focusing on a use case for license metadata that comes from research institutions. They need to know which version of an article (or other content item) may be exposed in an open repository, and from what date, and tell anyone who comes across the piece of content in the repository what they can do with it once they find it there.</p>
<p>Without this being stated simply and clearly in the Crossref metadata, the institution won’t know which works they can make available and which they cannot, even if you as the publisher know that the item is open access, or is open access after a certain date. This can impact the research community’s capacity to find and use the research you publish.</p>
<p>The guidance offers advice on:<br />
1. the kind of license information it’s useful to link out to from the Crossref metadata
2. what the Crossref metadata might look like for:<br />
* gold open access content<br />
* green open access content with a Creative Commons License<br />
* green open access content with a publisher-defined post-embargo license<br />
3. how to add this metadata to existing or new Crossref deposits</p>
<h3 id="take-a-look-at-the-full-guidelines-help-license-best-practice-here">Take a look at <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/license-best-practice/">the full guidelines</a> here.</h3>
<p>Maybe there’s more to the story than this, or more information that you need as a publisher or as a research institution - if so, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">let us know</a> and we can adapt this document based on your feedback. Requests for socks may be declined.</p>Rest in peace Christine Honehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/rest-in-peace-christine-hone/
Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000Crossrefhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/rest-in-peace-christine-hone/<p><em>Our friend and colleague Christine Hone (née Buske) passed away in May from a short but brutal illness. Here is our attempt at &lsquo;some words&rsquo;, which we wrote for her funeral book and are posting here with her husband Dave&rsquo;s permission.</em></p>
<p>We are devastated to lose Christine as a colleague and friend. It’s hard to put into words the effect she had on our small organization in such a short time, and how much we’re already missing her. But here it goes.</p>
<p>It was 2015 when some of us first met Chris, and we immediately saw how much of an asset she could be to our organization. She was very active in the community and well-known in many academic and publishing circles around the world. And she had an enviable combination of technical skills, a scientific mind, and a natural ability to engage people.</p>
<p>We tried to recruit her back then but she was in demand by others and it wasn’t until early 2018 that we succeeded. We finally got her! She became the Product Manager for a very advanced and complex system but she took to it perfectly, with real excitement and a complete understanding of how we (and therefore she) could help the research community all over the world see and make connections.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/christine-headshot.jpg"
alt="Christine&amp;rsquo;s official Crossref headshot 😊" width="40%"/> <figcaption>
<p>Christine&rsquo;s official Crossref headshot 😊</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With colleagues spread around the world, she joined an organization that had exciting opportunities and its share of challenges. Chris engaged with all of this head-on. She handled a constant stream of queries from people spread across time zones, whilst at the same time getting to grips with a service that was difficult to pin down. She balanced these tasks which were at very opposite ends of the spectrum. She added so much and with such energy and intelligence to everything she got involved in, always bringing human attention and creativity.</p>
<p><figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/winners-chris-uksg-2018.jpg"
alt="Chris was also on the winning team at 2018&amp;rsquo;s UKSG quiz!" width="50%"/> <figcaption>
<p>Chris was also on the winning team at 2018&rsquo;s UKSG quiz!</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/uksg-chris-2018.jpg"
alt="Ed, Amanda, and Chris: the Crossref contingent of the winning quiz team" width="50%"/> <figcaption>
<p>Ed, Amanda, and Chris: the Crossref contingent of the winning quiz team</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>In her talk at the 5:AM altmetrics conference she brought together technical detail, big-picture ideas, and her own particular passion. Her opening words were “My name is Christine and I’m a recovering fish scientist”. Never afraid to bring her personal brand of humour into the workplace, her opening slide was a photograph of her covered in rats. That presentation was the first time that much of the audience really understood our service. Having cracked the messaging for us, she was due to give the same talk at our annual meeting in Toronto a few months later…</p>
<p><figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/5am-rats.png"
alt="Chris&amp;rsquo;s opening slide at her 5:AM talk" width="50%"/> <figcaption>
<p>Chris&rsquo;s opening slide at her 5:AM talk</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/5am-chris.jpg"
alt="Chris giving her now legendary talk at 5:AM on Event Data" width="50%"/> <figcaption>
<p>Chris giving her now legendary talk at 5:AM on Event Data</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>Many of us were in Toronto for that meeting; it was two weeks after we’d heard the news of her diagnosis. Some of us were able to visit her in the hospital where she told us of her and Dave’s decision to bring forward their wedding plans. It was a bittersweet announcement but, clearly, they adored each other and were determined to be happy together despite the challenging times ahead.</p>
<p>Over the last few months, even when she had little energy to spare, Chris popped in (virtually) to chat and update us, share pictures and, selflessly, to see how we were doing. Even people who never met or worked closely with her started to follow her vlog and exchange notes and news directly.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/chris-message-may-9-2018.png"
alt="Always checking in with us, an update from Chris shortly before she passed" width="60%"/> <figcaption>
<p>Always checking in with us, an update from Chris shortly before she passed</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We have all been rocked by the news and there is a lot of sadness and grief among the Crossref staff and community. Even in the last moments we shared together Chris always asked about how her projects were going. Her passion for her products was a big part of what animated her when she first joined. Throughout her late-stage illness, this remained constant. She yearned to return to work. This zeal will forever be an inspiration to us all at Crossref.</p>
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190609161008/https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/christine-buske/">Christine</a> taught us a lot, through her work, with her attitude to life, and in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeUvw-bWejaHH3bhaB6aEEg">the manner that she dealt with this terrible illness</a>. We thank her for giving us so many great memories and we will never forget her.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/chris4.png"
alt="A Crossref photoshoot; our Christine ❤️" width="80%"/> <figcaption>
<p>A Crossref photoshoot; our Christine ❤️</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>Similarity Check is changinghttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/similarity-check-is-changing/
Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/similarity-check-is-changing/
<h2 id="tl-dr">Tl;dr</h2>
<p>Crossref is taking over the service management of Similarity Check from Turnitin. That means we&rsquo;re your first port of call for questions and your agreement will be direct with us. This is a very good thing because we have agreed and will continue to agree the best possible set-up for our collective membership. Similarity Check participants need to take action to confirm the new terms with us as soon as possible and before 31st August 2019. Instructions will be circulated early June via email.</p>
<h2 id="background">Background</h2>
<p>Many of our members use <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check">Similarity Check</a> which gives their editors reduced-rate access to Turnitin’s iThenticate system for plagiarism checking. Some use Similarity Check directly and some as part of a submission system.</p>
<p>The service launched in 2008 when we <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/news/2008-06-19-crosscheck-plagiarism-screening-service-launches-today">announced our initial partnership with Turnitin</a>. Since then it&rsquo;s gone from strength to strength and now has over 60 million full-text documents (from over 87 thousand titles) available for text comparison and almost 1500 members using the service.</p>
<p>The way that the Similarity Check arrangement works is changing, and it’s important that users know what’s happening. We have worked with Turnitin to set up a process that will transition participants easily and swiftly into the upgraded service with no access interruptions to iThenticate access.</p>
<h2 id="so-what-is-changing-and-why">So, what is changing and why?</h2>
<p>We know that Similarity Check is a critical service for our members, and we want to improve people&rsquo;s experience of using it. So, in consultation with members, we’ve strengthened the service by updating our relationship with Turnitin to consolidate all the components of the service under our care and stewardship. From next week, Similarity Check participants will move from having an agreement with Turnitin to one with Crossref. And at Crossref, we have a new agreement with Turnitin as the technology provider for the service.</p>
<p>The new arrangement puts us in a strong position to improve support and drive future improvements of the system. Representing our collective membership, we’ve agreed better terms than what people have today and what members would get acting individually.</p>
<p>There are five key changes specifically:</p>
<ol>
<li>Members&rsquo; Similarity Check service agreement will be with us and not Turnitin.</li>
<li>Per-document checking fees will be invoiced by us, and not Turnitin. They’ll be included in members&rsquo; regular invoices, reducing international transfer fees for many.</li>
<li>The first 100 documents checked each year will be free of charge.</li>
<li>Turnitin will operate as a vendor for Crossref. We’ve already agreed a range of additions to their technology roadmap. Turnitin will remain responsible for fixing any bugs or technical issues with the system, but we&rsquo;re in a stronger position to ensure these are fixed quickly.</li>
<li>Users will get training and on-boarding support from Crossref. This will cover both how to use the interface and how to interpret the results.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="what-s-staying-the-same">What’s staying the same?</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>The system itself and how it&rsquo;s accessed</strong> - people&rsquo;s logins will stay exactly the same and nothing will change about how participants have their systems set up.</li>
<li><strong>The <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/fees/#similarity-check-fees">fees</a></strong> - the annual Similarity Check fee and the per-document checking fees will remain at the same level (although under the new arrangement users will get the first 100 documents each year for free - see &ldquo;what&rsquo;s changing&rdquo; above!)</li>
<li><strong>Your service obligations</strong> - members still need to make at least 90% of all their journal article content available for Turnitin to index. This is achieved through the dedicated full-text URLs that members register in their metadata.</li>
<li><strong>Licensing and privacy</strong> - there are no changes to the licensing of members&rsquo; content or the privacy requirements for Turnitin’s use of member content.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="for-existing-users">For existing users</h2>
<p>We’ve worked closely with Turnitin to ensure an easy transition to the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check/terms/">new Crossref terms</a>. You can transition to the new terms at any stage from next week through to 31st August, and Turnitin will end your contract with them in the month you take that action.</p>
<p>Next week, we’ll email your main Crossref membership contact with a link to a form asking them to click-through accept the new terms. This will confirm and commence the transition process.</p>
<p>You’ll then need to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Pay your final Turnitin invoice, which will be sent at the end of the month you complete the form. This will cover your per-document checking fees up to the 25th of that month.</li>
<li>Continue to use iThenticate as usual.</li>
</ul>
<p>Your service agreement will officially move from the Turnitin agreement to the Crossref agreement on the 25th of the month that you complete the transition form. The next Similarity Check invoices you receive will be from Crossref in January 2020 and will include your Similarity Check annual fee and your per-document checking fees for the remainder of 2019.</p>
<p>If you haven’t transitioned to the new agreement by 31st August, you risk losing access to the iThenticate system as Turnitin will not be able to automatically renew your direct contract.</p>
<p>If you have any questions about these changes, do contact our <a href="mailto:member@crossref.org">membership team</a>. We’ll be in touch next week with a link to a new form where you’ll be able to check your details and accept the new agreement directly with us.</p>
<h2 id="for-prospective-users">For prospective users</h2>
<p>When you apply to participate in Similarity Check you will be accepting terms directly with Crossref and not Turnitin. Eligible members can apply any time from next week.</p>
<h2 id="any-questions">Any questions?</h2>
<p>There are many benefits to this new set-up, but we understand these things can be a bit of a hassle. We&rsquo;ve welcomed a new colleague (say hello to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/kathleen-luschek">Kathleen</a>!) to help people transition and get the best from their use of Similarity Check. Please <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">contact her via Support</a> with any questions.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Update June 5th: we&rsquo;ve added a new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/faqs/similarity-check-transition/">FAQ page</a> for members who signed up for Similarity Check prior to June 2019]</p>
</blockquote>
Putting content in contexthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/putting-content-in-context/
Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000Kirsty Meddingshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/putting-content-in-context/<p>You can’t go far on this blog without reading about the importance of registering <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used/">rich metadata</a>. Over the past year we’ve been encouraging all of our members to review the metadata they are sending us and find out which gaps need filling by looking at their <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Report</a>.</p>
<p>The metadata elements that are tracked in Participation Reports are mostly beyond the standard bibliographic information that is used to identify a work. They are important because they provide context: they tell the reader how the research was funded, what license it’s published under, and more about its authors via links to their <a href="https://orcid.org/">ORCID</a> profiles. And while this metadata is all available through our APIs, we also display much of it to readers through our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark/">Crossmark</a> service.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/crossmark.png" alt=“the crossmark box" height="448px" width="350px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>Crossmark is also about providing context. It is a button placed on content, which when clicked on brings up a pop-up box that tells the reader about significant updates such as corrections and retractions, together with other information about the publishing and editorial processes that have been applied to the content ahead of publication.</p>
<p>The Crossmark box can display information about authors, funders and licenses. In addition, our members can add “More information” and often do in the form of publication history, links to supporting materials, and peer review information. All of this supporting information helps the reader assess how well the content has been - and continues to be - curated by the publisher.</p>
<h3 id="who-s-in">Who’s in?</h3>
<p>250 Crossref members have signed up to use Crossmark (it’s an add-on service with its own <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/fees/#crossmark-fees">fees</a>). Though optional, some star pupils have even added Crossmark to their backfile content and as a result have Crossmark coverage on 99% of their content (kudos to PLOS, Rockefeller University Press and the societies represented by KAMJE, to name a few).</p>
<p>At the other extreme, some have applied Crossmark to less than 10% - these tend to be members with backfile content going back many decades, who are just implementing Crossmark for their more recent published content. Crossmark coverage is one of the things tracked in Participation Reports - pop over and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">take a look</a> if you want to see what your organization is doing.</p>
<p>So what additional metadata has been registered by members using Crossmark? (data snapshot from our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/rest-api/">REST API</a> April 2019):</p>
<ul>
<li>8,711,500 content items have some Crossmark metadata
<ul>
<li>104,650 updates to content have been registered. Of these</li>
<li>55,000 are corrections and 28,000 errata</li>
<li>16,000 are new versions or new editions</li>
<li>2,700 are retractions and 1,280 are withdrawals</li>
</ul></li>
<li>4,830,510 content items have some custom metadata, which appears in the More Information section of the Crossmark box. The most common metadata provided here is publication history, followed by copyright statements, the peer review method used, and whether the item has been checked for originality using Similarity Check.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="some-news-on-clicks-and-views">Some news on clicks and views</h3>
<p>We’ve been collecting usage statistics more or less since the Crossmark service launched in 2012, but have lacked a suitable way to share them. This will change later this year! In preparation, I’ve been digging around in the data and uncovered some interesting things.</p>
<p>I was able to do a degree of comparison between Crossmark usage against overall article views using PLOS articles as they make their usage data openly available. I spot-checked fifteen articles and found that most of them had a monthly number of clicks on the Crossmark button in the low-twenties, regardless of the number of total page views the article had received.</p>
<div style="text-align:center;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/crossmark-plos-stats.png" alt=“graph of crossmark clicks vs article views" height="267px" width="600px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>The highly viewed paper above shows relatively very few clicks on the Crossmark button, whereas on the paper with fewer views, below, clicks on the button follow the overall pattern of usage.</p>
<div style="text-align:center;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/crossmark-plos-stats-2.png" alt=“graph of crossmark clicks vs article views" height="267px" width="600px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>It’s not unreasonable to suppose that a paper with very high usage has a higher proportion of lay readers visiting it, whereas a more niche paper is being visited by those with a research interest. This is encouraging, as it suggests researchers are interested in checking the status of the content and the additional “trust signals” that the Crossmark box can provide.</p>
<h3 id="web-pages-vs-pdfs">Web pages vs PDFs</h3>
<p>We track the number of clicks on the Crossmark button in PDFs separately to those that come from web pages. (There are some that we can’t determine, usually because the link behind the button has been incorrectly formatted, but for most members these are minimal.)</p>
<p>I looked at the 30 members with most Crossmark coverage, and averaged the number of clicks over a six month period in 2018. For two thirds of these members, clicks on the Crossmark button on their web pages exceed those in their PDFs, but there are also definite outliers.</p>
<div style="text-align:center;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/crossmark-pdf-html.png" alt=“graph of crossmark clicks vs article views" height="370px" width="600px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>Some are easily explained: member #6 hasn’t put the Crossmark button in any of their PDFs, while member #21 has <em>only</em> put it in their PDFs. Member 10 has the button on its article landing pages hidden in a “more information” section that the reader has to click to expand.</p>
<p>That said, member #20 has the button displayed prominently next to the article title but gets 85% of Crossmark clicks from PDFs. There’s no obvious subject bias - four of the members above are physics publishers - two have many more PDF clicks, two have more HTML.</p>
<p>None of the findings above contain nearly enough data to draw any definitive conclusions, but I hope they pique your interest to find out more when we make Crossmark usage statistics available to all members later this year. In the meantime if you have any suggestions/questions, or would be interested in helping us when we come to testing the statistics interface, please <a href="mailto:kmeddings@crossref.org">let me know</a>.</p>A simpler text query formhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-simpler-text-query-form/
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000Isaac Farleyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-simpler-text-query-form/<p>The <a href="https://0-apps-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/SimpleTextQuery">Simple Text Query form</a> (STQ) allows users to retrieve existing DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box. For years the service has been heavily used by students, editors, researchers, and publishers eager to match and link references.</p>
<p>We had changes to the service planned for the first half of this year - an upgraded reference matching algorithm, a more modern interface, etc. In the spirit of openness and transparency, part of our project plan was to communicate these pending changes to STQ users well in advance of our 30 April completion date. What would users think? Could they help us improve upon our plans?</p>
<p>About a month ago, I reached out to the 21,000 plus users we had on record of using STQ since January 2018. We received nearly 85 responses from the messages we sent. Questions ranged from: if we were making changes, would PubMed ID matching be supported? To: What about the reliability of the returned reference links? And: Could we better accommodate larger reference lists?</p>
<p>Many of the users we heard from told us how STQ was critical to their work. I read all these messages. The concerns raised by users were legitimate and much appreciated. We reassessed our project timeline and plans, and decided to shift course. So, what <em>are</em> we doing?</p>
<h3 id="what-s-changing">What’s changing?</h3>
<ul>
<li>The previous hurdle of having to register your email address simply to return reference links was confusing and unnecessary. We removed it.</li>
<li>We previously limited the number of monthly reference links to 5,000 per email address. Most didn’t reach the limit, but those who did were frustrated by it and/or found ways around it. We want you to match and register as many references as possible, so we removed the monthly limit too.</li>
<li>Many of you with long reference lists found that you were occasionally reaching our limit of 30,000 characters per submission. Once again, we want you to match and register as many references as possible so we removed the character limit altogether and instead are just looking at the number of references per submission. We now provide space for 1,000 references per submission (We checked. The most references we have ever received via the STQ form in one submission was around 750. Thus, we rounded up.).</li>
<li>We did make a change to the backend of the service. We updated <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match/">the algorithm</a> we use to return reference links. We think it’s <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/reference-matching-for-real-this-time/">an improvement</a>. Let us know how you find it.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-s-remaining-the-same">What’s remaining the same?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Core functionality. It&rsquo;s all in the name. Retrieve DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box.<br /></li>
<li>PubMed ID matching. You use it. You need it. We’re keeping it.</li>
<li>Deposits. You’ll still need an email address for this, but we won’t ask for it until you’re at the deposit screen.</li>
<li>The interface. We’re still eager to give the user interface a much-needed refresh, but, as many users pointed out to us, there’s still some core functionality that’s important that we need to retain with any interface update. For instance, you need to be able to easily copy and paste reference links into your reference list. That functionality isn’t going anywhere.</li>
<li>Resetting reference links. Submit references, match, reset, and repeat. Many users like the reset button. It’s not going anywhere either.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="xml-queries">XML queries</h3>
<p>The change to the backend of the service that I mentioned above is not confined to reference matching and depositing for STQ users. XML queries for reference matching are also now powered by that new backend. We think it’s a seamless transition, but if you find it is not, please let us know.</p>
<p>I’m excited for these changes and hope you are too. I invite you to try the simpler and improved STQ form, and <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">let us know what you think</a>.</p>Express your interest in serving on the Crossref boardhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/express-your-interest-in-serving-on-the-crossref-board/
Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/express-your-interest-in-serving-on-the-crossref-board/
<p>The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2019 election.</p>
<p>The board&rsquo;s purpose is to provide strategic and financial oversight and counsel to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:</p>
<ol>
<li>Setting the strategic direction for the organization;</li>
<li>Providing financial oversight; and</li>
<li>Approving new policies and services.</li>
</ol>
<p>The Board tends to review the strategic direction every few years, taking a landscape view of the scholarly communications community and trends that may affect Crossref&rsquo;s mission. In July 2017, the board and staff came up with four strategic themes and these have been developed into an <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/strategy">organization-wide roadmap</a>.</p>
<p>The board votes on any new policy or service that staff and committees propose if it is a departure from normal practice for Crossref.Some of the recent things the board has approved include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Approval of all the new terms of membership; broadening of the membership eligibility criteria to include non-publishers.</p></li>
<li><p>Involvement in the ROR.org initiative including community outreach, technical prototyping, and helping to explore governance options.</p></li>
<li><p>Approval of a proposal for funders to join at a reduced annual fee; the registration of DOIs for research grants.</p></li>
<li><p>Allocating $50,000 USD of the operating budget to research the community&rsquo;s level of interest in a distributed usage service.</p></li>
<li><p>Specifying the Board makeup to include equal numbers of small and large members; reframing the election processes.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-is-expected-of-a-crossref-board-member">What is expected of a Crossref Board member?</h3>
<p>Board members should be able to attend all board meetings, which occur three times a year in different parts of the world. If you are unable to attend in person you may send your named alternate as your proxy or be able to attend via telephone.</p>
<p>Board members must:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>be familiar with the three key responsibilities listed above;</p></li>
<li><p>actively participate and contribute towards discussions; and</p></li>
<li><p>read the board documents and materials provided, prior to attending meetings.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="how-to-submit-an-expression-of-interest-to-serve-on-the-board">How to submit an expression of interest to serve on the Board</h3>
<p>We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have experience on a governing board (as opposed to an operational board) and have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you.</p>
<p>If you are a Crossref member, are <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/are-you-having-an-identity-crisis/">eligible to vote</a>, and would like to be considered, you can complete and submit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwqraD2fjb3eqZgLpTQWsMYPQvvz4LARLq6k8H8mA7xGbZAw/viewform">expression of interest form</a> with both your organization&rsquo;s statement and your personal statement before <strong>21 May 2019</strong>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is important to note it is your organization who is the Crossref member&mdash;and therefore the seat will belong to your organization.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="about-the-election-and-our-board">About the election and our Board</h3>
<p>We have a principle of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/truths/">&ldquo;one member, one vote&rdquo;</a>; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn&rsquo;t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are five seats up for election in 2019, 4 large and 1 small.</p>
<p>The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/">View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they&rsquo;ve made (motions).</a></p>
<p>The slate will be decided by the Nominating Committee and interested parties will be informed if they have made the slate by July 15, 2019.</p>
<p>The election opens online in September 2019 and voting is done by proxy online, results will be announced at the annual business meeting during &lsquo;Crossref LIVE19&rsquo; on 13th November 2019 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available online to all Crossref members in September 2019.</p>
<h3 id="the-role-of-the-nominating-committee">The role of the Nominating Committee</h3>
<p>The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Nominating Committee is charged with selecting a slate of candidates for election from those who have expressed an interest.</p>
<p>The selection of the slate (which might exceed the number of open seats) is based on the quality of the expressions of interest and the nominating committee&rsquo;s review of the candidates in light of the board&rsquo;s directive of maintaining an appropriately balanced and representative board. The nominating committee will prioritize maintaining representation of members having both commercial and non-commercial business models, in addition to continuing to seek balance across factors such as gender, ethnic and racial background, geography, and sector.</p>
<p>The Board voted in March 2019 that balance according to size (based on revenue tier) will be achieved by a 2019 slate consisting of one revenue tier 1 seat (small) and 4 revenue 2 seats (large), and a 2020 slate consisting of 4 revenue tier 1 seats and 2 revenue tier 2 seats <em>(see <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/bylaws">Crossref&rsquo;s amended Bylaws</a> on the Crossref website)</em>.</p>
<p>The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members. The current Nominating Committee members are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Jasper Simons, APA (Chair);</p></li>
<li><p>Scott Delman ACM;</p></li>
<li><p>Catherine Mitchell, CDL;</p></li>
<li><p>Vincent Cassidy, The Institution of Engineering &amp; Technology (IET); and</p></li>
<li><p>Claire Moulton, The Company of Biologists.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Please <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwqraD2fjb3eqZgLpTQWsMYPQvvz4LARLq6k8H8mA7xGbZAw/viewform">submit your expression of interest</a> or reply to me with any questions at <a href="mailto:lhart@crossref.org">lhart@crossref.org</a>. This is your opportunity to help guide our wonderful organization!</p>
Quarterly deposit invoices: avoiding surpriseshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/quarterly-deposit-invoices-avoiding-surprises/
Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000Isaac Farleyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/quarterly-deposit-invoices-avoiding-surprises/<p>Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.</p>
<p>This problem is usually the result of metadata being registered that makes it look as though the content was current, despite the fact that it was backlist. This post will show you what to do if you spot this problem in your latest invoice - and more importantly, how you can avoid this situation in the future.</p>
<h3 id="about-current-and-backlist-content-registration-fees">About current and backlist content registration fees</h3>
<p>There are different fees for registering content depending on whether it’s current (this year and the previous two years - 2017, ‘18, and ‘19) or backlist (older than that). As an example, it’s $1 each for a current journal article, and $0.15 for each backlist article. So, if you’ve incorrectly registered your content as published in 2019 when actually it was published in 2012, your quarterly invoice will overcharge you based on the metadata discrepancy.</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/quarterly_invoice_test.png" alt="Sample quarterly deposit invoice" width="550" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<ol>
<li>We send you the quarterly deposit invoice at the end of each quarter. This example is an invoice for all deposits of the first quarter of 2018 for username ‘test’ - months January, February, and March.</li>
<li>The BY code represents backlist (or, back year) content (journal article, in this example). Backlist content is charged at $0.15 per content item.</li>
<li>The CY code represents current year content (journal article, in this example, although you can see that this invoice has charges for other content items as well). Current year content is charged at $1 per content item.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="determining-whether-content-is-current-or-backlist">Determining whether content is current or backlist</h3>
<p>A record is determined to be either a backlist or current year deposit based on the metadata that you deposit with us. If you use our helper tools - <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a> or the <a href="https://0-apps-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webDeposit/">web deposit form</a> - the system looks at the information you’ve entered into the “publication date” field. If you deposit XML with us, it looks at the date in the <code>&lt;publication_date&gt;</code> element. And we look at each individual item separately—so even if you’ve put a publication date at journal level, you still need to put it at the journal article level too.</p>
<p>Additionally, sometimes we find that deposits mistakenly include the deposit date in place of the publication date. These two dates - the deposit date and the publication date - are not necessarily one and the same, especially if you are depositing backlist content. Please take care to double check this before you submit your deposit(s).</p>
<h3 id="what-to-do-if-you-think-you-ve-registered-the-wrong-publication-date">What to do if you think you’ve registered the wrong publication date</h3>
<p>As you can only update a publication date by running a full re-deposit, it’s important to get it right the first time. If you’ve registered the wrong publication date and have received an invoice for the wrong amount, please re-deposit your content and then <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">get in contact with us</a>. If you do this as soon as you spot the error, we’ll be able to send a new invoice for the correct amount.</p>Here’s to year one!https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/heres-to-year-one/
Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/heres-to-year-one/
<p>Our Ambassador Program is now one year old, and we are thrilled at how the first 12 months have gone. In 2018 we welcomed 16 <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/our-ambassadors/">ambassadors</a> to the team, based in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Ukraine, USA, and Venezuela.</p>
<p>Our ambassadors are volunteers with a good knowledge of Crossref and the wider scholarly community, they are well connected and passionate about the work that we do. Participating in the ambassador program is complementary to people’s existing roles and enables those who already work with Crossref to have a mechanism to feed back to us and to provide support for their communities.</p>
<p>We reflected on the successes and challenges of the first 12 months and discovered quite a lot has been achieved so far.</p>
<div class="quotecite">
<blockquote>
<p>The Ambassador Program better equips me to support researchers to conduct outreach and collaborate in multidisciplinary discovery!</p>
</blockquote>
<p><cite>&ndash; Woei Fuh Wong, Research 123, Singapore</cite></p>
</div>
<div class="quotecite">
<blockquote>
<p>Within the framework of the Ambassador Crossref program, I ran a seminar, webinar, and held several meetings in Ukrainian scientific organizations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><cite>&ndash; Andrii Zolkover, Internauka, Ukraine</cite></p>
</div>
<div class="quotecite">
<blockquote>
<p>In my role as ambassador, I am able to provide a greater level of support in Russian. Alongside translated materials, we have also received over 400 tickets to our Russian electronic support system and made over 300 consultations by phone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><cite>&ndash; Maxim Mitrofanov, NEICON, Russia</cite></p>
</div>
<div class="quotecite">
<blockquote>
<p>Being an ambassador has enabled me to increase knowledge of Crossref within my community.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><cite>&ndash; Edilson Damasio, Department of Mathematics Library of State University of Maringá-UEM, Brazil</cite></p>
</div>
<div class="quotecite">
<blockquote>
<p>The ambassador program has helped in vastly raising the awareness of Crossref and its services all over the world. Based in the Middle East, I see the need in the Arab region to know more about Crossref in their mother tongue (Arabic). The program has proven success and its positive impact is tangible.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><cite>&ndash; Mohamad Mostafa, Knowledge E, UAE</cite></p>
</div>
<h2 id="highlights">Highlights</h2>
<p>Over the course of 2018, there were a number of big achievements which would not have been possible without the help of our ambassadors.</p>
<p>Due to your feedback, we’re very keen to expand the level of multi-language support we offer our diversifying community. In addition to translating key messages, slide decks, and other educational materials, our ambassadors (and some members - thanks also!) helped us in the production of a series of short videos. We now have videos available for each of the Crossref services in nine languages including English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Bahasa Indonesia. You can see in the chart below, that although our English videos have the most views (this is the default language), others have also experienced a lot of visitors, particularly notable are the Chinese and Spanish language videos. This underscores the importance of further support in non-English languages, as our series of multi-lingual webinars also demonstrated.</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Service-video-plays-ambassador-blog.png" alt="Service video plays" width="500px" />
</p>
<p>In 2018 we ran webinars in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. Several ambassadors have taken a lead in running these webinars in their local languages with assistance from Crossref staff on producing materials and answering questions on the day. Spanish language webinars saw record numbers of attendees from a range of different countries, and our Russian webinar recordings have been viewed over 200 times. We will be continuing to offer more webinars in different time zones and languages, and the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webinars/">recordings</a> are always available for anyone who can’t attend on the day.</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Arabic-webinar-ambassador blog.png" alt="Arabic webinar" width="500px" />
</p>
<p>Our ambassadors have also been helping us improve and expand our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">LIVE local events</a>. Last year we held events in Japan, South Africa, Russia, Germany, Brazil and India. Ambassadors help by providing recommendations on venues, accommodation, guest speakers, or even attending and speaking at the event themselves. Some run their own Crossref events which we can help provide materials and also represent Crossref at related industry events in their region. You may have had the chance to meet some of our ambassadors at our annual event in Toronto last November as well.</p>
<p>As our ambassadors are our representatives, acting as our eyes and ears in the wider community, it is important that they are kept up to date with new developments and have good opportunities to report back to us. The ambassador team has participated in beta-testing of a number of new initiatives including our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/metadata-manager/">Metadata Manager</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Reports</a> and our upcoming Community Forum. By providing feedback from their own user perspective and from how they anticipate those in their communities will view and use these tools, it enables us get better insights into how an initiative might work before launching it more widely.</p>
<h2 id="future-plans">Future Plans</h2>
<p>Initial feedback on the program has been overwhelmingly positive, both from the ambassadors themselves and the wider Crossref community, so we’re looking at what we can do to hone the program over time. In 2019 we will be welcoming some more ambassadors to the team to further support our global community. We want to support our ambassadors, so we don’t foresee the group growing to the point where there are too many ambassadors for us to be able to engage with. You can read about the team and where they are based, as well as all about the new ambassadors we have welcomed so far this year, on <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/our-ambassadors/">Our Ambassadors</a> page.</p>
<p>This year our ambassadors will be involved when we launch our online community forum (more to come on that soon). They’re already helping with the task-force that is advising on a new education curriculum, and we’ll be providing them with further training on Crossref tools and services. We also have more webinars and LIVE locals in the pipeline. Keep an eye on our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webinars/">webinars</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">events</a> pages for more details as they come.</p>
<p>So a final thank you to our ambassador team - it has been great to work with you over the last year, and we look forward to how we can continue to work together!</p>
Before, during, and after - a journey through title transfershttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/before-during-and-after-a-journey-through-title-transfers/
Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000Isaac Farleyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/before-during-and-after-a-journey-through-title-transfers/<p>In January, I wrote about how we’ve <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/resolutions-2019-journal-title-transfers-metadata-manager/">simplified the journal title transfer process</a> using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post. But, whether you choose to process the transfer yourself via Metadata Manager or need some help from <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/paul-davis/">Paul</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/shayn-smulyan/">Shayn</a>, or myself, there’s more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a>, as I’m sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.</p>
<h3 id="prepping-your-title-transfer">Prepping your title transfer</h3>
<p>Sometimes members get on the other side of a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-can-often-change-but-always-stays-the-same/">title transfer</a> and find you’re encountering problems even if you followed the process for transferring titles. You might find you can register new content for the new title against your own prefix without any issues. But you are not able to update the metadata for backfile content after we’ve made the transfer.</p>
<p>When we investigate, the problem is usually that the DOIs you’re trying to update don’t exist in our system yet. This means the deposit isn’t considered an update to the content, it’s considered a new deposit. And you don’t have permission to do that, since you’re effectively attempting to register new content to a prefix that is not your own.</p>
<p>This problem is because the former publisher didn’t ever register the DOIs with us - even though they’ve been displaying them on their website. This is bad practice and isn’t in keeping with our membership terms, but it does sometimes happen.</p>
<p>Before you request a title transfer, do check with the former publisher that they’ve definitely registered all the DOIs that they’ve been displaying and distributing to their readership. You can spot check this yourself by following a few of the DOI links and checking that they resolve to the right place. If you want a full list of DOIs registered to a journal title, our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/06members/51depositor.html">depositor reports</a> are the place to start. Depositor Reports list all DOIs deposited for a title on a publisher-by-publisher basis. Or, alternatively, if you know the journal cite ID, the unique internal, Crossref identifier for the journal, you can bypass the publisher-by-publisher title list (in my example you’d need to replace my fictional 123456 journal ID with your journal’s cite ID):</p>
<p><center><code>http://0-data.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/depositorreport?pubid=J123456</code></center></p>
<h3 id="top-tips-for-a-pain-free-title-transfer">Top tips for a pain-free title transfer</h3>
<p>If your organization has gained new titles, you’ve checked the depositor report for your new journal and are happy that all the existing DOIs have been registered, then you’re ready to process the transfer. Here are three key steps to ensure a pain-free transfer.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If you are not acquiring all existing journal articles as part of this transfer, you’ll need to contact us at <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a> to confirm the details. Once we have those details sorted, we&rsquo;ll transfer ownership for the select, specified articles.</p></li>
<li><p>Carefully check the existing metadata associated with your new titles - some metadata provided for <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/sections/203047543">text and data mining</a> or <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check/">Similarity Check</a> are publisher-specific and must be updated or <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/115003564483-Removing-metadata-from-a-record">removed</a> when content is acquired by another member.</p></li>
<li><p>If the metadata supplied is fine, you just need to update the URLs to direct DOIs to your content. You can do this by sending us a <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213022526">URL update file</a> or by <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213022486">re-depositing the metadata</a> with the correct URLs.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If you need to update more than the URLs, you should re-deposit the metadata with the correct information plus the correct URLs.</p>
<ul>
<li>Note: If you, as the disposing publisher, are prepared to transfer your journal to an acquiring publisher, and would like to transfer ownership of the journal and all existing journal articles, please try your new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/resolutions-2019-journal-title-transfers-metadata-manager/">title transfer via Metadata Manager</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="on-the-other-side">On the other side</h3>
<p>If you follow the steps I’ve outlined above, you should get to the other side of your title transfer with few problems and are likely to encounter smooth metadata seas ahead. That said, some of our members follow these steps to a tee and still are faced with occasional transfer-related problems.</p>
<p>Perhaps the previous journal owner used a different scheme to assign timestamps and now you’re receiving <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215789303-Error-and-warning-messages-">mysterious timestamp errors</a> when you deposit. Or, that same previous owner made a mistake with a previous deposit and accidentally submitted more than one journal title record. Or, you encounter a strange, new error in Metadata Manager when working with your new titles (yes, we’re still in beta!). If so, please reach out to us at <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a> and we’ll help solve what are surely confounding problems, since you’ve undoubtedly read this post in its entirety and taken heed of the above advice.</p>
<p>As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers, please contact us at <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a>.</p>Work through your PID problems on the PID Forumhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/work-through-your-pid-problems-on-the-pid-forum/
Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/work-through-your-pid-problems-on-the-pid-forum/<p>As self-confessed PID nerds, we’re big fans of a persistent identifier. However, we’re also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isn’t a done deal, and there are things that challenge how broadly these are adopted by the community.</p>
<p>At <a href="https://pidapalooza.org/">PIDapalooza</a> (an annual festival of PIDs) in January, ORCID, DataCite and Crossref ran an interactive session to chat about the cool things that PIDs allow us to do, what’s working well and, just as importantly, what isn’t, so that we can find ways to improve and approaches that work.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/yin_yang_board.jpg" alt=“the yin yang board" height="150px" width="400px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>We titled the session the Yin &amp; Yang of PIDs and challenged attendees to put down on paper (post-its) their thoughts about what’s good about PIDs (the Yin) and what’s not so good (the Yang). Attendees could also upvote other’s comments by adding a smiley face sticker to the concept(s) they supported.</p>
<p>So what came out of the session? <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5281/zenodo.2572718">Lots of things</a>!</p>
<ul>
<li>Limits to PID uptake are often more cultural than technical</li>
<li>Yay for <a href="https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006896394-Auto-updates-time-saving-and-trust-building">auto-update</a>!</li>
<li>Slow adoption of new PID types</li>
<li>Trust issues (I don’t want my information in another system)</li>
<li>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m the only Erik, I don&rsquo;t need an ORCID&rdquo;</li>
<li>User stories work!<br /></li>
</ul>
<div style="float:left;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/what_are_pids.jpg" alt=“what are PIDs" height="100px" width="300px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>We know we only scratched the surface in the session, but fortunately PIDapalooza also brought a good way to continue the conversation: <a href="https://pidforum.org">pidforum.org</a>! The PIDforum was <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5281/zenodo.2548649">launched at PIDapalooza</a> and is a global discussion platform for all things PID-related. Many PID providers and PID users are already on there, so help us understand more about the yin and yang of PIDs by sharing your own PID problems!</p>
ROR announces the first Org ID prototypehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/ror-announces-the-first-org-id-prototype/
Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000Maria Gouldhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/ror-announces-the-first-org-id-prototype/
<p>What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you&rsquo;d be absolutely right!</p>
<p>Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;re energized by the positive reception and response we&rsquo;ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community. Here are the links to our latest work, a recap of everything that happened in Dublin, some of the next steps for the project, and how the community can continue to be involved.</p>
<h2 id="ta-da-the-first-ror-prototype">🎉 Ta da! The first ROR prototype</h2>
<p>The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is finally here! We&rsquo;re thrilled to officially announce the launch of our ROR MVR (minimum viable registry). The MVR consists of the following components, which are ready for anyone to use right now.</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>ROR IDs:</strong> Starting with seed data from <a href="https://www.grid.ac/">GRID</a>, ROR has begun assigning unique identifiers to approximately 91,000 organizations in its registry. ROR IDs include a random, unique, and opaque 9-character string and are expressed as URLs that resolve to the organization&rsquo;s record. For instance, here is the ROR ID for California Digital Library: <a href="https://ror.org/03yrm5c26">https://ror.org/03yrm5c26</a></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Search:</strong> We also built a search interface to look up organizations in the registry: <a href="https://ror.org/search">https://ror.org/search</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/UQfE-D0oO6TNUdWPapf3LT-hj6v5l9NdD4LzGDR_A_ZPSKjvTKOlS9LsiTSVEgh_ia--yAbVWBukOHVmucYEymzxPvpAhp15zv1R0bYcQy_OArLAeiasDaIlPXaunVhPbU_Ebrg8" alt="" /></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>ROR records:</strong> ROR IDs are stored with additional metadata about the organization, such as alternate names/abbreviations, external URLs (e.g., an organization&rsquo;s official website), and other identifiers, such as Wikidata, ISNI, and the Open Funder Registry. This metadata will allow ROR to be interoperable with other identifiers and across different systems. The current schema is based on GRID&rsquo;s dataset and we plan to incorporate other metadata fields over time and according to community needs.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/0e54ZDo4MMbXFcwFCjFR27ZC7c1EmqAiybwEV12a4wLSvQNbIIyMeIdKyBJNk2SQLYPXNsLXMmDoUozf4fHSF7Qjlhvq1UtnP_poFPPkdavmd9YQaTN5JvJ9zL_9lVPdVyU83l1M" alt="" /></p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>API:</strong> The ROR API is now public. You can access the JSON files at <a href="https://api.ror.org/organizations">https://api.ror.org/organizations</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>OpenRefine reconciler:</strong> We&rsquo;ve released an OpenRefine reconciler that can map your internal identifiers to ROR identifiers: <a href="https://github.com/ror-community/ror-reconciler">https://github.com/ror-community/ror-reconciler</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Documentation:</strong> We have begun storing documentation on Github and will be adding more as we go along. Please feel free to follow and contribute: <a href="https://github.com/ror-community/ror-reconciler">https://github.com/ror-community</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="community-meeting-recap">Community meeting recap</h2>
<p>On January 22, 60+ representatives from across the research and publishing community gathered in Dublin to see what the ROR project team has been up to, demo the first prototypes in action, and discuss where we want to go next - and, of course, to practice ROR-ing together.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/pride-of-lions.jpg" alt=“ROR-ing lions Dublin 2019" height="300px" class="img-responsive"></p>
<p>In the second half of the meeting, attendees split into discussion groups to identify specific aspirations for ROR and brainstorm concrete actions needed to achieve these goals, focusing on the main use case of exposing and capturing all research outputs of a given institution. The proposed ideas covered a spectrum of possibilities for ROR, highlighting the following themes:</p>
<h3 id="ror-as-seamlessly-integrated-and-sometimes-invisible-infrastructure">ROR as seamlessly-integrated and sometimes invisible infrastructure</h3>
<ul>
<li><p>Integration between and within existing systems (and in new ones!)</p></li>
<li><p>Auto-detection of ROR IDs for example in manuscript tracking and funding application platforms</p></li>
<li><p>As such, researchers don&rsquo;t ever have to be responsible for knowing what a ROR is and using it appropriately - the systems they use will do this for them.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="ror-as-a-critical-piece-of-funder-workflows-and-infrastructure">ROR as a critical piece of funder workflows and infrastructure</h3>
<ul>
<li><p>Demonstrate to funders how ROR can help them analyze impact of research they fund</p></li>
<li><p>Conduct outreach with key international funders, especially those interested in open infrastructure</p></li>
<li><p>Make funders aware of ROR and encourage them to adopt and mandate use of ROR IDs - involve funders at the beginning to collaborate on technology</p></li>
<li><p>Integrate ROR with existing systems and identifiers already in use by funders and other stakeholders</p></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="ror-as-a-trusted-registry-collaborative-partner-and-responsible-steward">ROR as a trusted registry, collaborative partner, and responsible steward</h3>
<ul>
<li><p>Culturally sensitive, inclusive, and respectful of what countries are already doing with regard to organizational identifiers, partnering with national bodies working on this and mapping ROR IDs to locally used identifiers.</p></li>
<li><p>Involve the institutions listed in the registry early on as well as CRIS systems</p></li>
<li><p>Interoperability with existing communities and governance bodies</p></li>
<li><p>Workflows to support trust and responsible management of organizational metadata, with policies and procedures for long-term curation and maintenance of records</p></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="what-we-re-hearing">What we&rsquo;re hearing</h2>
<p>Now that the ROR MVR is here, we&rsquo;re hearing some really good questions about the data we&rsquo;re capturing, how it can be used, and how we&rsquo;ll be maintaining the registry going forward. We wanted to take a moment to respond to some of these questions.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-the-criteria-for-being-listed-in-ror-what-is-a-research-organization">What is the criteria for being listed in ROR? What is a &ldquo;research organization&rdquo;?</h3>
<p>We define the notion of &ldquo;research organization&rdquo; quite broadly as any organization that conducts, produces, manages, or touches research. This is in line with ROR&rsquo;s stated scope, which is to address the affiliation use case and be able to identify which organizations are associated with which research outputs. We use &ldquo;affiliation&rdquo; to describe any formal relationship between a researcher and an organization associated with researchers, including but not limited to their employer, educator, funder, or scholarly society.</p>
<h3 id="will-ror-map-organizational-hierarchies">Will ROR map organizational hierarchies?</h3>
<p>No - ROR is focused on being a top-level registry of organizations so we can address the fundamental affiliation use case, and provide a critical source of metadata that can interoperate with other institutional identifiers.</p>
<h3 id="ror-ids-are-cool-what-can-i-do-with-them">ROR IDs are cool - what can I do with them?</h3>
<p>Now that we have built our MVR, we will be working to incorporate ROR IDs into relevant pieces of the scholarly communication infrastructure. If you are a publisher, funder, metadata provider, research office, or anyone else interested in capturing affiliations, please get in touch with us to discuss how we might coordinate. If you are a developer, you are welcome to start playing around with the API: <a href="https://api.ror.org/organizations">https://api.ror.org/organizations</a>.</p>
<h3 id="there-s-an-error-in-my-organization-s-ror-record-can-you-fix-it">There&rsquo;s an error in my organization&rsquo;s ROR record &mdash; can you fix it?</h3>
<p>For the time being, please email <a href="mailto:info@ror.org">info@ror.org</a> to request an update to an existing record in ROR or request that a new record be added. We will formalize our data management policies and procedures in the next stage of the project.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-ror-s-relationship-to-other-organizational-identifiers">What is ROR&rsquo;s relationship to other organizational identifiers?</h3>
<p>For ROR to be useful, it needs to augment the current offerings in a way that is open, trusted, complementary, and collaborative, and not intentionally competitive. We are committed to providing a service that the community finds helpful and not duplicative, and enables as many connections as possible between organization records across systems.</p>
<h3 id="i-have-my-own-dataset-of-institutional-affiliations-can-i-give-it-to-ror">I have my own dataset of institutional affiliations &mdash; can I give it to ROR?</h3>
<p>We are always happy to hear about other efforts to capture affiliation data. Please get in touch with us to discuss how we might coordinate.</p>
<h3 id="can-ror-support-multiple-languages-and-character-sets">Can ROR support multiple languages and character sets?</h3>
<p>GRID already supports multiple languages and character sets, so by extension ROR will have this enabled as well. Here is one example: <a href="https://ror.org/01k4yrm29">https://ror.org/01k4yrm29</a>.</p>
<h3 id="how-will-ror-handle-curation-i-e-updating-records-if-an-organization-changes-its-name-or-ceases-to-exist">How will ROR handle curation, i.e., updating records if an organization changes its name or ceases to exist?</h3>
<p>The curation and long-term management of records will be a cornerstone of our efforts in 2019 and we hope to release a working set of policies and procedures soon.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-next-for-ror">What&rsquo;s next for ROR</h2>
<p>Now that we have our MVR, what happens next for ROR? We&rsquo;re eager to sustain the momentum from January&rsquo;s stakeholder meeting at the same time we know there are some longer-term plans to put in place, and so we&rsquo;re looking at both some immediate tasks as well as bigger-picture questions.</p>
<h3 id="product-development">Product development</h3>
<p>We have a few to-do items on our list following the launch of the MVR to keep everything running smoothly while we develop a comprehensive long-term product roadmap.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Rewrite some of the code for both the API and the OpenRefine reconciler</p></li>
<li><p>Address a few bugs in our repos</p></li>
<li><p>Provide guidance for troubleshooting issues</p></li>
<li><p>Communicate our processes for users to request changes, report bugs, and suggest features</p></li>
</ul>
<p>As a reminder, you can access the existing code in Github: <a href="https://github.com/ror-community">https://github.com/ror-community</a></p>
<h3 id="policy-development">Policy development</h3>
<p>We&rsquo;ve been emphasizing here and in community conversations that our primary focus now turns to formulating policies and procedures to ensure the successful management of ROR data over the long term. This is something we can&rsquo;t (and shouldn&rsquo;t) do on our own &mdash; we want to work with community stakeholders to develop the right solutions and establish the right frameworks. We understand the urgency of firming up these policies, but we are also aware that something this important can take time to complete and is not something to rush into lightly.</p>
<h3 id="community-development">Community development</h3>
<p>To help guide the next stages of the project, we are putting out an open call for participation in the ROR community advisory group. Advisory group members will be involved in giving input on data management, testing out new features, giving feedback on the product roadmap, and discussing ideas for events and outreach. We plan to convene this advisory group through bimonthly calls and asynchronous communication channels through the end of the year. We hope you will consider joining us! Please email <a href="mailto:info@ror.org">info@ror.org</a> if you are interested.</p>
<p>For those who want to stay informed about the project but not necessarily be part of the advisory group, you have other options!</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Sign up for our mailing list (via the footer at <a href="https://www.ror.org">ror.org</a>)</p></li>
<li><p>Join our community on Slack (<a href="http://0-www.tinyurl.com.libus.csd.mu.edu/ror-community">www.tinyurl.com/ror-community</a>),</p></li>
<li><p>Follow us on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/ResearchOrgs">@ResearchOrgs</a>).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You can also always drop us a line at <a href="mailto:info@ror.org">info@ror.org</a>, and let us know if you&rsquo;d ever like to set up a meeting or conference call to talk about the project in more detail.</p>
<h2 id="final-thoughts">Final thoughts</h2>
<p>Community engagement has been vital to ROR&rsquo;s beginnings and will likewise be critically important for the next steps that we take. As both a registry of identifiers and a community of stakeholders involved in building open scholarly infrastructure, ROR depends on guidance and involvement at multiple levels. Thank you for being part of the journey thus far, and for joining us on the road that lies ahead. 🦁</p>
Request for feedback on grant identifier metadatahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/request-for-feedback-on-grant-identifier-metadata/
Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000Patricia Feeneyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/request-for-feedback-on-grant-identifier-metadata/
<p>We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/">first rule of grant identifiers</a> which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ resonates in a way other terms do not. The truth is in the metadata, and we intend to collect (and our funder friends are prepared to provide) information about a number of funding types. Hopefully we encompass all of them.</p>
<p>Our technical &amp; metadata working group (a subset of the broader <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/funders">Funder Advisory Group</a>) includes folks from Children&rsquo;s Tumor Foundation, Europe PMC, European Research Council, JST, OSTI (DOE), Smithsonian, Swiss National Science Foundation, UKRI, Wellcome, as well as colleagues at DataCite and ORCID.</p>
<p>They have provided a wealth of funding data and feedback, and together we’ve come up with a metadata schema that works for us. Just as important - does this set of metadata meet your needs? Did we miss something? Let us know.</p>
<h3 id="the-details">The details</h3>
<p>For those of you familiar with Crossref Content Registration, Grant IDs will have their own dedicated schema that differs from our publication schema. The Grant ID schema will follow some of the same conventions as we’ll be using the same system to process the files (which will be XML) but since we are collecting metadata for a new community and moving beyond published content, this is an opportunity to rethink how we handle some basics like person names and dates.</p>
<p>Each Grant ID can be assigned to multiple projects. The metadata within each project includes basics like titles, descriptions, and investigator information (including affiliations) as well as funding information. Funders will supply funder information (including funder identifiers from the Crossref Funder Registry) as well as information about funding types and amounts.</p>
<p>A major accomplishment of the group was to develop a simple taxonomy of types of funding. Supported types are:</p>
<ul>
<li>award</li>
<li>contract</li>
<li>grant</li>
<li>salary-award</li>
<li>endowment</li>
<li>secondment</li>
<li>loan</li>
<li>facilities</li>
<li>equipment</li>
<li>seed-funding</li>
<li>fellowship</li>
<li>training-grant</li>
<li>other</li>
</ul>
<p>Funding involves more than monetary grants or awards and we’ve attempted to capture the broad categories of funding types. This list is taken from types of funding as defined by our participating funder organizations. We anticipate this list will evolve over time.</p>
<p>Ready to dig in? The schema and documentation are <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/grantID-schema/">available on GitHub</a>. We will actively take feedback until the end of February 2019. We hope to begin implementation soon after that. Please let us know what you think through GitHub, or feel free to contact me via <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">feedback@crossref.org</a>.</p>
Underreporting of matched references in Crossref metadatahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/underreporting-of-matched-references-in-crossref-metadata/
Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000Geoffrey Bilderhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/underreporting-of-matched-references-in-crossref-metadata/<h2 id="tl-dr">TL;DR</h2>
<p>About 11% of available references in records in our OAI-PMH &amp; REST API don&rsquo;t have DOIs when they should. We have deployed a fix, but it is running on billions of records, and so we don’t expect it to be complete until mid-April.</p>
<p>Note that the Cited-by API that our members use appears to be <em>unaffected</em> by this problem.</p>
<h2 id="the-gory-details">The gory details</h2>
<p>When a Crossref member registers metadata for a publication, they often include references. Sometimes the member will also include DOIs in the references, but often they don’t. When they don’t include a DOI in the reference, Crossref tries to match the reference to metadata in the Crossref system. If we succeed, we add the DOI of the matched record to the reference metadata. If we fail, we append the reference to an ever-growing list which we re-process on an ongoing basis.</p>
<p>You may have seen that <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/reference-matching-for-real-this-time/">the R&amp;D team has been doing work to improve our reference matching system</a>. We will soon be rolling out a new reference matching process that will increase recall significantly.</p>
<p>But while testing our new reference matching approach, we started to see inconsistent results with our existing legacy reference matching system. When we implemented new regression tests, we noticed that, even when using our legacy system, we were consistently getting <em>better</em> results than were reflected in the metadata we exposed via our APIs. For example, we would pick a random Crossref DOI record that included 3 matched references, and when we tried matching all the references in the record again using our existing technology, we would get <em>more</em> matched references than were reported in the metadata.</p>
<p>At first, we thought this might have something to do with sequencing issues. For example, that article <em>A</em> might cite article <em>B</em>, but somehow article <em>A</em> would get its DOI registered with Crossref prior to article <em>B</em>. In this theoretical case, we would initially fail to match the reference, but it would eventually get matched as we continued to reprocess our unmatched references. But this wasn’t the issue. And the problem was not with the matching technology we are using. Instead, we discovered a problem with the way we process references on deposit.</p>
<p>When a member deposits references with Crossref, each reference has to include a member-defined key that is unique to each reference they are depositing in the DOI record. When we match a reference- we report to the members that we matched the reference with key X to DOI Y. The problem is that sometimes members would deposit references with an empty key. If there was only one such reference, then, technically, it would pass our test for making sure the key was unique within the record. So we would process the reference, and match it, and report it via our Cited-by service, but later in the process, when we went to include the matched DOI in the reference section of our API metadata, we’d skip including DOIs for references that had blank keys. The reference itself would be included in the metadata, it would just appear that we hadn’t matched it to a DOI when we actually had.</p>
<p>Again, we estimate this to have resulted in about 11% of the references in our metadata to be missing matched DOIs. We are processing our references again and inserting the correctly matched DOIs in the metadata. We expect the process to complete in mid-April. We will keep everybody up-to-date on the progress of this fix.</p>
<p>We will also be integrating the new matching system that we’ve developed. As mentioned at the start of this post, this matching system will also increase the recall rate of our reference matching and so, the two changes combined, should result in users seeing a significant increase in the number of matched references included in Crossref metadata.</p>
<p>And finally, as part of the work that we are doing to improve our reference matching, we are putting a comprehensive testing framework that will make it easier for us to detect inconsistencies and/or regressions in our reference matching.</p>
<p>Please contact <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">Crossref support</a> with any questions or concerns.</p>How Crossref metadata is helping bring migration research in Europe under one roofhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-crossref-metadata-is-helping-bring-migration-research-in-europe-under-one-roof/
Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-crossref-metadata-is-helping-bring-migration-research-in-europe-under-one-roof/<p><em>Conflict, instability and economic conditions are just some of the factors driving new migration into Europe—and European policy makers are in dispute about how to manage and cope with the implications. Everyone agrees that in order to respond to the challenges and opportunities of migration, a better understanding is required of what drives migration towards Europe, what trajectories and infrastructures facilitate migration, and what the key characteristics of different migrant flows are, in order to inform and improve policy making.</em></p>
<p>The abstract above is taken from the successful Horizon 2020[1] project proposal called CrossMigration, an initiative of <a href="https://www.imiscoe.org/">IMISCOE</a>, Europe’s largest migration research network, in which a consortium of 15 universities, think tanks and international organizations, led by <a href="https://www.eur.nl/en">Erasmus University Rotterdam</a> is currently designing a Migration Research Hub. The Hub is a web-based platform aimed at helping researchers and policymakers get a quick and comprehensive overview on research in the field of migration studies. This platform will also feature reports on specific fields, methodological briefing papers and other relevant content produced by the consortium.</p>
<p>The core of this Hub will consist of a database providing access to publications, research projects and datasets on migration drivers, and infrastructures, flows, and policies on current and future migration questions, indicators and scenarios. And that’s where our metadata story starts.</p>
<p>At the tail end of December I had the pleasure of speaking to the four researchers and developers working on this database; Vienna-based researchers Roland Hosner and Meike Palinkas from the <a href="https://www.icmpd.org/home/">International Centre for Migration Policy and Development</a> (ICMPD), Bogdan Taut, CEO of <a href="http://www.youngminds.ro/">YoungMinds</a>, in Bucharest, Romania, and Nathan Levy, currently studying for his PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Netherlands.</p>
<h3 id="there-are-four-of-you-can-each-of-you-give-me-a-very-brief-introduction-to-yourselves-and-how-you-fit-into-project">There are four of you, can each of you give me a very brief introduction to yourselves and how you fit into project?</h3>
<p><strong>Bogdan:</strong> I’m from YoungMinds, based in Bucharest in Romania. We were the last to join the consortium as the technical developer on the project. I am the project manager of the team, coordinating the technical development of the database.</p>
<p><strong>Roland:</strong> I am a research officer with the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) in Vienna, and we are leading a part of this research project which deals with the population and implementation of the research database—which is core to the Migration Research Hub, and to the whole project.</p>
<p><strong>Meike:</strong> I am also a research officer at ICMPD and work together with Roland. I joined the team in September this year.</p>
<p><strong>Nathan:</strong> I’m part of the coordinating team of the overall project of CrossMigration. We are coordinating putting together the Migration Research Hub, the biggest part of which is the migration database. I am based at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and I work for Professor Peter Scholten who is the overall coordinator of the whole project along with Dr. Asya Pisarevskaya.</p>
<h3 id="how-long-has-the-project-been-in-progress">How long has the project been in progress?</h3>
<p><strong>Roland:</strong> It’s a two-year project than runs from March 2018 to the end of February 2020.</p>
<h3 id="so-it-s-a-two-year-project-and-you-are-10-months-in-that-makes-it-nearly-at-the-halfway-mark-have-you-encountered-any-stumbling-blocks-that-have-held-you-back">So it’s a two-year project and you are 10 months in—that makes it nearly at the halfway mark. Have you encountered any stumbling blocks that have held you back?</h3>
<p><strong>Bogdan:</strong> How to put this in a diplomatic way? We are all working around the clock to meet the deadline that we set ourselves and promised to deliver by. We have made the decision to produce the database in stages—very soon we will have the beta version out, so we have something to present. Then we are going to continue populating it with more items from every content type – journal articles, datasets, books, book chapters, reports etc.. At this point the other partners in the consortium can actually use it and work with it to map the fields and find the most recent and relevant literature on their respective subtopics such as migration drivers or migration infrastructures. In the summer when we are confident that it is a sound and attractive tool to be released, we will make it publicly available.</p>
<p><strong>Nathan:</strong> In terms of specific deliverables for the project so far, our team has developed a taxonomy for migration research to give the fields a logical structure, and to structure this research database.</p>
<h3 id="how-has-crossref-metadata-contributed-to-your-project">How has Crossref metadata contributed to your project?</h3>
<p><strong>Bogdan:</strong> We began by discussing all of the sources that need to be in the database and we put together an inventory of publishers, books and book chapters, etc., that would be relevant. Part of the scope of work for YoungMinds was to find ways of extracting information and relevant content from those sources. Once we started to dig into the content we found out that there are relevant aggregators, such as Scopus, Crossref, Web of Science and so on. We actually found Crossref through a recommendation from Scopus, someone there said ‘OK Crossref might be able to help you more’. Then Crossref became one of our main sources for metadata—in terms of basic metadata related to some types of content we gather for our database, such as journals and journal articles.</p>
<p><strong>Roland:</strong> The more we moved forward, the more we saw how difficult it was to get in touch with each publisher individually, with each journal individually, to try and secure an agreement with them. So, it became very clear to us very quickly that we would not be able to create a properly inclusive database this way and we knew we had to look for partners and make use of existing resources. As we progressed from one conversation to the next we received a lot of advice, and that’s how we found out about Crossref. It soon became clear that Crossref was the ideal source for us because everything that has a DOI can be found in there. We knew if we had an agreement with Crossref then our project is half won, our database is halfway built, perhaps even more. And, then we just need to fill the gaps.</p>
<p><strong>Nathan:</strong> Yes, this is one of Crossref’s key strengths—rather than having individual researchers or individual projects go to each publisher to try to find the appropriate people to talk to and negotiate—you use Crossref.</p>
<h3 id="which-of-the-metadata-values-are-important-to-you-what-do-you-extract">Which of the metadata values are important to you, what do you extract?</h3>
<p><strong>Roland:</strong> We thought about this a lot at the beginning, what we wanted to include. There are certain key things that are indisputably relevant—such as titles, names of the authors, editors, the year, DOI, dataset and so on, because we always link to the original source—the publisher’s website, or the journal article website. Ideally we would include keywords and abstracts (where they are available) because the richer the information the better. We also wanted to classify the items we have according to the taxonomy the CrossMigration project has established.</p>
<p><strong>Nathan:</strong> In addition, abstracts and keywords have value for us. We want to apply a logical structure into the taxonomy on migration research, but we need content in order to do that. We need something for the algorithms that YoungMinds have developed to read to in order categorize research accordingly. The body of research on migration is so great and we cannot read through every abstract that’s ever been published on migration. That’s where the value of abstracts and keywords comes in for the Taxonomizer (as we fondly refer to it!).</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-you-like-to-see-in-the-rest-api-that-isn-t-there">What else would you like to see in the REST API that isn’t there?</h3>
<p><strong>Roland:</strong> More abstracts! We love abstracts!</p>
<p><strong>Bogdan:</strong> Our data schema contains more fields, so we need more metadata than we can find from Crossref and other sources. Basically, the publisher’s website would produce the richest data, but it is the hardest to read. We are on a quest to find more sources because our algorithm works better if it has more information.</p>
<h3 id="once-it-s-complete-what-are-your-plans-to-roll-it-out-to-the-wider-world">Once it’s complete, what are your plans to roll it out to the wider world?</h3>
<p><strong>Bogdan:</strong> IMISCOE is the leading organization of this consortium and it is in touch with most of the migration experts in Europe, so we already have all the contacts of the relevant people in the field.</p>
<p><strong>Meike:</strong> It’s a tool for helping the community, so once we have all the relevant content inside it, we believe that word will spread relatively easily.</p>
<h3 id="have-you-all-actually-met-in-person">Have you all actually met in person?</h3>
<p><strong>Roland:</strong> Yes! Myself and Nathan met at the project kick-off meeting in Rotterdam in March 2018, then we met at a conference in Florence in June that was partly for the consortium but also had other invited experts and scholars. That was where we met face-to-face for the first time—it was just after we signed with YoungMinds for the IT services. And we recently met at another joint conference of IMISCOE and CrossMigration called <a href="https://twitter.com/CrossMigration/status/1067762112485879808">&lsquo;Towards the IMISCOE Research Infrastructure of the Future&rsquo;</a>.</p>
<p><em>[1] Horizon 2020, the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available.</em></p>
<hr />
<p>Great speaking to you all and learning a bit about this important project that will help policymakers manage and cope with the implications of migration—and may possibly even help them find ways to influence it.</p>
<hr />
<p>If you&rsquo;d like to share how you use our Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>Zen and the Art of Platform Migrationhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/zen-and-the-art-of-platform-migration/
Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Amanda Bartellhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/zen-and-the-art-of-platform-migration/<p>Nowadays we’re all trying to eat healthier, get fitter, be more mindful and stay in the now. You think you’re doing a good job — perhaps you’ve started a yoga class or got a book on mindfulness. And then, wham! Someone in your organization casually mentions they’re planning a platform migration. I can sense the panic from here.</p>
<p>While the <a href="https://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory/">Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale</a> doesn’t include platform migration as one of the top ten most stressful life events, we hear from our members that it should probably be in there somewhere. There’s so much to think about and plan for - how do you know you’re choosing the right platform partners for the future? How can you be sure that your understanding of what they offer really matches what you need? Will it make it easier for your readers to access your content? What about delays? What if it all breaks on changeover day?</p>
<p>Gaaaaah!</p>
<p>With all that to think about, worrying about whether your DOIs will resolve and what the migration will mean for the quality of your Crossref metadata just seems like an unnecessary layer of stress. It is, however, very important to consider this - even before you start thinking about who your platform partners will be. The process of working through these things up front could help you make better decisions, and set you up for success with the project and into the future.</p>
<p>So, to help you plan ahead, we’ve created a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/service-providers/migrating-platforms/">platform migration guide</a> that offers guidance on things like:</p>
<ul>
<li>What to consider even before you start selecting a new service provider</li>
<li>Planning the change over process</li>
<li>The change over itself (and what that means for your URLs)</li>
<li>What you should do after the migration is complete</li>
</ul>
<p>The guide gives advice on how to plan for what you really need right now, and what you’re going to need in the future. For example, what metadata are you going to want to register with us and share with the thousands of industry organizations that make use of the data? What other Crossref services might benefit you in the future? What different content types are in your publishing plans?</p>
<p>The guide also has a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/service-providers/platform-checklist/">handy checklist</a> which you can include in your Request For Proposal documentation, to ensure that you’re asking the right questions of potential suppliers.</p>
<p>Once you’ve read the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/service-providers/migrating-platforms/">platform migration guide</a>, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">let us know</a> if there’s anything else you think we should add to it - we’re sure many of you have platform migration stories, and it’s good to share!</p>
<hr />What can often change, but always stays the same?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-can-often-change-but-always-stays-the-same/
Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Isaac Farleyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-can-often-change-but-always-stays-the-same/<p>Hello. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/isaac-farley/">Isaac</a> here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each.</p>
<p>When you join Crossref, you are provided with a unique prefix, you then add suffixes of your choice to your prefix and this creates the DOIs for your content.</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/DOI-structure.png" alt="Structure of a DOI directory suffix and prefix" width="550" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>It’s a logical step then to assume you can tell just by looking at a DOI prefix who the current publisher is—but that’s not always the case. Things can (and often do) change. Individual journals get purchased by other publishers, and whole organizations get bought and sold.</p>
<p>What you can tell from looking at a DOI prefix is who originally registered it, but not necessarily who it currently belongs to. That’s because if a journal (or whole organization) is acquired, DOIs don’t get deleted and re-registered to the new owner. The update will of course be reflected in the relevant metadata, but the prefix itself will stay the same. It never changes—and that’s the whole point, that’s what makes the DOI persistent.</p>
<p>Here’s a breakdown of how this works internally at Crossref:</p>
<h3 id="title-transfers">Title transfers</h3>
<p>Member A acquires a single title from member B. We transfer the title (and all relevant reports) over to member A. Member A must then register new content for that journal on their own prefix. The existing (newly acquired) DOIs maintain the ‘old’ prefix but member A can update metadata against these existing DOIs for that journal. Backfile and current DOIs for that journal may, therefore, have different prefixes—and that’s OK!</p>
<h3 id="organization-transfers">Organization transfers</h3>
<p>Member C acquires member D. We move the entire prefix (and all relevant reports) over to Member C, and close down Member D’s account with Crossref. Member C can continue to register DOIs on member D’s prefix (the original prefix) if they want to, or they can use their own existing prefix. So again, backfile and current DOIs for that journal may have different prefixes.</p>
<p>And by the way, if Member C uses a service provider to register metadata on their behalf, we will simply enable their username to work with the prefix.</p>
<h3 id="it-s-now-easier-to-transfer-titles">It’s now easier to transfer titles</h3>
<p>We&rsquo;ve recently made the process of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/resolutions-2019-journal-title-transfers-metadata-manager/">transferring journal titles</a> a lot easier with our new content registration tool, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a>.</p>
<hr />Myth busting in Mumbaihttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/myth-busting-in-mumbai/
Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/myth-busting-in-mumbai/
<p>In December, Crossref’s Head of Metadata, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/patricia-feeney">Patricia Feeney</a> and I headed to Mumbai for our first ever LIVE local event in India, held in collaboration with <a href="https://www.editage.com/">Editage</a>.</p>
<p>Crossref membership in India has escalated in recent years, with a fifth of its 500 members joining in 2017 alone. Around 40% of these new members are smaller organizations who joined through one of the eight <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/sponsors/">sponsors</a> we currently have in the country.</p>
<p>With such a large increase in membership numbers, it seemed timely to visit and meet both our new and longer-standing members face-to-face. Our LIVE local events provide a great opportunity for us to learn what challenges our members in the community face, so we can understand how to best meet their needs. It also gives us a chance to explain in detail how to benefit from the services we offer, as well as keep them informed about any future developments. A special thanks goes to Editage for all their help in organizing, promoting, and running this event with us.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Clarinda Cerejo - LIVE Mumbai.png" alt=“LIVE Mumbai" height="150px" width="400px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>The Mumbai event was held at the Sahara Star hotel and attended by participants from a range of organizations, with varying levels of knowledge about Crossref. Patricia talked about how to register your content and the importance of providing us with accurate and comprehensive metadata. She also introduced our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/metadata-manager/">Metadata Manager</a> tool, which many participants were excited to hear more about. I gave an overview of Crossref services, with a specific focus on <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark/">Crossmark</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check/">Similarity Check</a>. The afternoon session was run by Editage, and featured a session on ‘<a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/editage-workshop-helping-journals-and-publishers-get-closer-to-authors">Helping journals and publishers to get closer to authors</a>’, followed by a lively debate on research integrity. The debate brought up a number of interesting talking points, including how to attract more students into a career in research, issues around malpractice and plagiarism, and how to improve India’s research culture.</p>
<p>The Q&amp;A part of the day highlighted a number of myths about Crossref that I thought would be worth detailing here, as other members may benefit from these explanations.</p>
<h3 id="myth-1-crossref-is-a-mark-of-publisher-and-content-quality">Myth #1: Crossref is a mark of publisher and content quality</h3>
<p>We have a membership application process where we ask for different types of information and make it clear what the Crossref member <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/terms">obligations</a> are. Crossref doesn’t assess the quality of its members’ content or verify members’ publication processes and procedures. It’s not our role or part of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/about/">our mission</a> to do these things.<br />
It’s important to remember that content with a Crossref DOI <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/dois-unambiguously-and-persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly-literature-right/">says nothing about the quality of the content</a>, or that it is peer-reviewed or authoritative.</p>
<h3 id="myth-2-crossref-archives-content">Myth #2: Crossref archives content</h3>
<p>We store the metadata our members provide about a piece of content, not the content itself. Our metadata is openly available across our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/">APIs</a> and <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">search interfaces</a>. The same applies for access to the full-text. A DOI will take you to a landing page for a piece of content, but access to the full-text will depend upon the content owner’s publishing model.</p>
<h3 id="myth-3-crossref-provides-impact-factors">Myth #3: Crossref provides impact factors</h3>
<p>On publisher websites, you’ll sometimes see the number of times a paper has been cited in Crossref, Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc. The Crossref citation information is made available to publishers through our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/cited-by/">Cited-by</a> service, but it is not an impact factor. Cited-by counts are based on the subset of Crossref’s members participating in that service, so they’ll probably differ from other sources. Crossref Cited-by counts are meant to complement other services rather than replace them.</p>
<h3 id="myth-4-crossref-charges-to-make-updates-or-corrections-to-the-metadata-associated-with-a-doi">Myth #4: Crossref charges to make updates or corrections to the metadata associated with a DOI</h3>
<p>Not true - while you have to pay for your initial registration, any subsequent updates, corrections or additions you make to the metadata of a content item is free of charge (apart from <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark/">Crossmark</a> metadata). If you’re a member, we actively encourage you to update your metadata to ensure that your records are as comprehensive and accurate as possible. This helps the scholarly community find and use the content you publish.</p>
<h3 id="myth-5-crossref-charges-for-failed-deposits">Myth #5: Crossref charges for failed deposits</h3>
<p>Only deposits which are successful will be counted. You will receive an error message if your metadata deposit has failed, so you are aware of any errors and can re-submit. If you’re not sure what has gone wrong, you can <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">contact our support team</a>.</p>
<h3 id="myth-6-you-need-to-have-separate-prefixes-to-register-different-content-types">Myth #6: You need to have separate prefixes to register different content types</h3>
<p>You can register all your content types under one prefix (and you don’t need to tell us if you start to do so).</p>
<h3 id="myth-7-doi-resolutions-are-how-many-dois-you-have-registered">Myth #7: DOI resolutions are how many DOIs you have registered</h3>
<p>No. When someone clicks on a DOI link for an article, we count that as one DOI resolution. This is different than the number of unique DOIs you have registered with us. We’ll send you a <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213197246-Resolution-Report">resolution report</a> once a month which provides details of your total number of resolutions, as well as DOIs which have been most frequently clicked, and any resolution failures. These failures can be an indication that you need to update your metadata with us for that particular article to ensure your DOI is directing readers to the correct webpage.</p>
<h3 id="myth-8-crossref-own-the-plagiarism-software-used-in-similarity-check">Myth #8: Crossref own the plagiarism software used in Similarity Check</h3>
<p>The Similarity Check service is provided in collaboration with <a href="https://www.turnitin.com/">Turnitin</a> who run the <a href="http://www.ithenticate.com/">iThenticate</a> text-comparison tool. The iThenticate database is the largest comparison database of full-text academic content in the world. Similarity Check participants enjoy cost-effective use of iThenticate because they contribute their own published content into Turnitin’s database. Turnitin also provides our members with access to additional features in iThenticate, such as enhanced text-matches within the document viewer and access to a dedicated Similarity Check support team in order to discuss any technical or billing queries.</p>
<p>It’s great to have the opportunity to do some myth-busting! You’re bound to have more questions, so we’ll be running more LIVE locals in 2019, as well as virtual events. To keep updated, follow us @CrossrefOrg, or <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/subscribe-newsletter/">subscribe to our newsletter</a>.</p>
<hr />
What's that DOI?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/whats-that-doi/
Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Joe Wasshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/whats-that-doi/
<p>This is a long overdue followup to 2016&rsquo;s &ldquo;<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/urls-and-dois-a-complicated-relationship/">URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship</a>&rdquo;. Like that post, this accompanies my talk at <a href="https://www.pidapalooza.org">PIDapalooza</a>, the premier festival of PIDs (Persistent Identifiers). I don&rsquo;t think I need to give a spoiler warning when I tell you that it&rsquo;s still complicated. But this post presents some vocabulary to describe exactly <em>how</em> complicated it is. Event Data has been up and running and collecting data for a couple of years now, but this post describes changes we made toward the end of 2018.</p>
<p>If Event Data is new to you, you can read about its development in <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/event-data/">other blog posts</a> and the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide">User Guide</a>. Today I&rsquo;ll be describing a specific but important part of the machinery: how we match landing pages to DOIs.</p>
<h2 id="some-background">Some background</h2>
<p>Our Event Data service provides you with a live database of links to DOIs, found from across the web and social media. Data comes from a variety of places, and most of it is produced by Agents operated by Crossref. We have Agents monitoring Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, blogs and more besides. It is a sad truth that the good news of DOIs has not reached all corners of world, let alone the dustiest vertices of the world wide web. And even within scholarly publishing and academia, not everyone has heard of DOIs and other persistent identifiers.</p>
<p>Of course, this means that when we look for links to content-that-has-DOIs, what we at Crossref call &lsquo;registered content&rsquo;, we can&rsquo;t content ourselves with only looking for DOIs. We also have to look for article landing pages. These are the pages you arrive at when you click on a DOI, the page you&rsquo;re on when you decide to share an article.</p>
<h2 id="half-full-or-half-empty">Half full or half empty?</h2>
<p>So we&rsquo;re trying to track down links to these landing pages, rather than just DOIs. You could look at this two ways.</p>
<p>The glass-half-empty view would be that it&rsquo;s a real shame people don&rsquo;t use DOIs. Don&rsquo;t they know that their links aren&rsquo;t future-proof? Don&rsquo;t they know that DOIs allow you to punch the identifier into other services?</p>
<p>The glass-half-full view is that it&rsquo;s really exciting that people outside the traditional PID crowd are interacting with the literature. We&rsquo;ve been set a challenge to try and track this usage. By collecting this data and processing it into a form that&rsquo;s compatible with other services we can add to its value and better help join the dots in and around the community that we serve. Not everyone tweeting about articles counts as &lsquo;scholarly Twitter&rsquo;, and hopefully we can bridge some divides (the subject of my talk at PIDapalooza last year, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/bridging-identifiers-at-pidapalooza/">&lsquo;Bridging Identifiers&rsquo;</a>).</p>
<h2 id="how-do-we-do-it">How do we do it?</h2>
<p>One of the central tenets of Event Data is transparency. We record as much information as we can about the data we ingest, how we process it, and what we find. Of course, you don&rsquo;t <em>have</em> to use this data, it&rsquo;s up to you how much depth you want to go into. But it&rsquo;s there if you want it.</p>
<p>The resulting data set in Event Data is easy to use, but allows you to peek beneath the surface. We do this by linking every Event that our Agents collect through to an Evidence Record. This in turn links to Artifacts, which describe our working data set.</p>
<p>One such Artifact is the humbly named <code>domain-decision-structure</code>. This is a big tree that records DOI prefixes, domain names, and how they&rsquo;re connected. It includes information such as &ldquo;some DOIs with the prefix <code>10.31139</code> redirect to the domain <code>polishorthopaedics.pl</code>, and we can confirm that pages on that domain correctly represent their DOI&rdquo;. We produce this list by visiting a sample of DOIs from every known prefix. We then ask the following questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>Which webpage does this DOI redirect to, and what domain name does it have?</li>
<li>Does the webpage include its correct DOI in the HTML metadata?</li>
</ol>
<p>From this we build the Artifact that records <code>prefix → domain</code> relationships, along with a flag to say whether or not the domain correctly represents its DOI in at least one case. You can put this data to a number of uses, but we use it to help inform our URL to DOI matching.</p>
<h2 id="what-agents-do">What Agents do</h2>
<p>The Agents use the domain list to search for links. For example, the Reddit Agent uses it to query for new discussions about websites on each domain. They then pass this data to the Percolator, which is the machinery that produces Events.</p>
<p>The Percolator takes each input, whether it&rsquo;s a blog post or a Tweet, and extracts links. If it finds a DOI link, that&rsquo;s low hanging fruit. It then looks for links to URLs on one of the domains in the list. All of these are considered to be candidate landing page URLs. Once it has found a set of candidate links in the webpage it then has to find which ones correspond to DOIs, and validate that correspondence.</p>
<p>For each candidate URL it follows the link and retrieves the webpage. It looks in the HTML metadata, specifically in the <code>&lt;meta name='dc.identifier' content='10.5555/12345678' &gt;</code>, to see if the article indicates its DOI. It also looks in the webpage to see if it reports its DOI in the body text.</p>
<h2 id="not-so-fast">Not so fast</h2>
<p>But can you trust the web page to indicate its own DOI? What about sites that say that they have a DOI belonging to another member? What about those pages that have invalid or incorrect DOIs? These situations can, and do, occur.</p>
<p>We have the following methods at our disposal, in order of preference.</p>
<ol>
<li><code>doi-literal</code> - This is the most reliable, and it indicates that the URL we found in the webpage was a DOI not a landing page. We didn&rsquo;t even have to visit the article page.</li>
<li><code>pii</code> - The input was a PII (Publisher Item Identifier). We used our own metadata to map this into a DOI.</li>
<li><code>landing-page-url</code> - We thought that the URL was the landing page for an article. Some webpages actually contain the DOI embedded in URL. So we don&rsquo;t even have to visit the page.</li>
<li><code>landing-page-meta-tag</code> - We had to visit the article landing page. We found a meta tag, eg. <code>dc.identifier</code>, indicating the DOI.</li>
<li><code>landing-page-page-text</code> - We visited the webpage but there was no meta tag. We did find a DOI in the body text and we think this is the DOI for this page. This is the least reliable.</li>
</ol>
<p>On top of this, we have a number of steps of validation. Again, these are listed in order of preference.</p>
<ol>
<li><code>literal</code> - We found a DOI literal, so we didn&rsquo;t have to do any extra work. This is the most reliable.</li>
<li><code>lookup</code> - We looked up the PII in our own metadata, and we trust that.</li>
<li><code>checked-url-exact</code> - We visited the landing page and found a DOI. We visited that DOI and confirmed that it does indeed lead back to this landing page. We are therefore confident that this is the correct DOI for the landing page URL.</li>
<li><code>checked-url-basic</code> - We visited the DOI and it led back to <em>almost</em> the same URL. The protocol (http vs https), query parameters or upper / lower case may be different. This can happen if tracking parameters are automatically added by the website meaning the URLs are no longer identical. We are still quite confident in the match.</li>
<li><code>confirmed-domain-prefix</code> - We were unable to check the link between the DOI and the landing page URL, so we had to fall back to previously observed data. On previous occasions we have seen that DOIs with the given prefix (e.g. &ldquo;10.5555&rdquo;) redirect to webpages with the same domain (e.g. &ldquo;www.example.com&rdquo;) and those websites correctly report their DOIs in meta tags. Only the domain and DOI prefix are considered. We therefore believe that the domain reliably reports its own DOIs correctly in at least some cases.</li>
<li><code>recognised-domain-prefix</code> - On previous occasions we have seen that DOIs with the given prefix (e.g. &ldquo;10.5555&rdquo;) redirect to webpages with the same domain (e.g. &ldquo;www.example.com&rdquo;). Those websites do not always correctly report their DOIs in meta tags. This is slightly less reliable.</li>
<li><code>recognised-domain</code> - On previous occasions we have seen that this domain is associated with DOIs in general. This is the least reliable.</li>
</ol>
<p>We record the method we used to find the DOI, and the way we verified it, right in the Event. Look in the <code>obj.method</code> and <code>obj.verification</code> fields.</p>
<p>Of course, there&rsquo;s a flowchart.</p>
<p><img class="img-responsive" src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2019/whats-that-doi/landing-page-flow.png"></p>
<p>You can take a closer look in the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/data/matching-landing-pages/">User Guide</a>.</p>
<p>If you think that&rsquo;s a bit long-winded, well, you&rsquo;re right. But it does enable us to capture DOI links without giving a false sense of security.</p>
<h2 id="so-what-happens">So, what happens?</h2>
<p>If you <a href="http://0-api.eventdata.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/events/distinct?from-collected-date=2019-01-01&amp;until-collected-date=2019-01-20&amp;rows=0&amp;facet=obj.url.domain:10">ask the Event Data Query API</a> for the top ten domains that we matched to DOIs in the first 20 days of January 2019, it would tell you:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Domain</th>
<th>Number of Events captured</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>doi.org</code></td>
<td>2058433</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>dx.doi.org</code></td>
<td>242707</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>www.nature.com</code></td>
<td>170808</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>adsabs.harvard.edu</code></td>
<td>163387</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>www.sciencedirect.com</code></td>
<td>96849</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>onlinelibrary.wiley.com</code></td>
<td>88760</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>link.springer.com</code></td>
<td>63869</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>www.tandfonline.com</code></td>
<td>41911</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>www.sciencemag.org</code></td>
<td>39489</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code>academic.oup.com</code></td>
<td>39267</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Here we see a healthy showing for actual DOIs (which you can explain by Wikipedia&rsquo;s excellent use of DOIs) followed by some of the larger publishers. This demonstrates that we&rsquo;re capturing a healthy number of Events from Wikipedia pages, tweets, blog posts etc that reference landing pages.</p>
<h2 id="awkward-questions">Awkward questions</h2>
<p>This is not a perfect process. The whole point of PIDs is to unambiguously identify content. When users don&rsquo;t use PIDs, there will inevitably be imperfections. But because we collect and make available all the processing along the way, hopefully we can go back to the old data, or allow any researchers to try and squeeze more information out of the data.</p>
<h3 id="q-why-bother-with-all-of-this-can-t-you-just-use-the-urls">Q: Why bother with all of this? Can&rsquo;t you just use the URLs?</h3>
<p>We care about persistent identifiers. They are stable identifiers, which means they don&rsquo;t change over time. The same DOI will always refer to the same content. In contrast, publishers&rsquo; landing pages can and do change their URLs over time. If we didn&rsquo;t use the DOIs then our data would suffer from link-rot.</p>
<p>DOIs are also compatible across different services. You can use the DOI for an article to look it up in metadata and citation databases, and to make connections with other services.</p>
<p>This is not the only solution to the problem. Other services out there, such as Cobalt Metrics, do record the URLs and store an overlaid data set of identifier mappings. At Crossref we have a specific focus on our members and their content, and we all subscribe to the value of persistent identifiers for their content.</p>
<p>Of course, we don&rsquo;t throw anything away. The URLs are still included in the Events. Look in the <code>obj.url</code> field.</p>
<h3 id="q-if-dois-are-so-amazing-why-keep-urls">Q: If DOIs are so amazing why keep URLs?</h3>
<p>Event Data is useful to a really wide range of users. Some will need DOIs to work with the data. But others, who may want to research the stuff under the hood, such as the behaviour of social media users, or the processes we employ, may want to know more detail. So we include it all.</p>
<h3 id="q-can-t-you-just-decide-for-me">Q: Can&rsquo;t you just decide for me?</h3>
<p>In a way, we do. If an Event is included in our data set, we are reasonably confident that it belongs there. All we are doing is providing you with more information.</p>
<h3 id="q-why-only-dois">Q: Why only DOIs?</h3>
<p>We specialise in DOIs and believe they are the right solution for unambiguously and persistently identifying content. Furthermore the content registered with Crossref has been done so for the specific benefits that DOIs bring.</p>
<h3 id="q-what-about-websites-that-require-cookies-and-or-javascript-to-execute">Q: What about websites that require cookies and/or JavaScript to execute?</h3>
<p>Some sites don&rsquo;t work unless you allow your browser to accept cookies. Some sites don&rsquo;t render any content unless you allow their JavaScript to execute. Large crawlers, like Google, emulate web browsers when they scrape content, but it&rsquo;s resource-intensive and not everyone has the resources of Google!</p>
<p>This is an issue we&rsquo;ve known about for a while. My talk <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/urls-and-dois-a-complicated-relationship/">two years ago</a> was about precisely this topic. We know it&rsquo;s a hurdle we&rsquo;ll have to overcome at some point. We do have plans to look into it, but we haven&rsquo;t found a sufficiently cost-effective and reliable way to do it yet.</p>
<p>Any sites that do do this will be inherently less reliable, so we recommend everyone to put their Dublin Core Identifiers in the HTML, render your HTML server-side (which is the default way of doing things) and don&rsquo;t require cookies.</p>
<h3 id="q-what-s-the-success-rate">Q: What&rsquo;s the success rate?</h3>
<p>This is an interesting question. The results aren&rsquo;t black and white. At the low end of the confidence spectrum we do have a cut-off point, at which we don&rsquo;t generate an Event. But when we do create one we qualify it by describing the method we used to match and verify the connection. What level of confidence you want to trust is for you to decide. We just describe the steps we took to verify it.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s tricky quantifying false negatives. We have plenty of unmatched links, but not every unmatched link even could be matched to a DOI, for example there are some domains that have some DOI-registered content mixed with non-registered content.</p>
<p>We therefore err on the side of optimism, and let users choose what level of verification they require.</p>
<p>So talking of false positives or false negatives is a complicated question. We&rsquo;ve not done any analytical work on this yet, but would welcome any input from the community.</p>
<h3 id="q-why-isn-t-the-domain-decision-structure-artifact-more-detailed">Q: Why isn&rsquo;t the <code>domain-decision-structure</code> Artifact more detailed?</h3>
<p>We looked into various ways of constructing this, including more detailed statistics. At the end of the day our processes have to be understandable and easy to re-use. The process already takes a flow-chart to understand, and we felt that we got the balance right. Of course, as a user of this data, you are welcome to further refine and verify it.</p>
Improved processes, and more via Metadata Managerhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/improved-processes-and-more-via-metadata-manager/
Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Shayn Smulyanhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/improved-processes-and-more-via-metadata-manager/<p>Hi, Crossref blog-readers. I’m <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/shayn-smulyan/">Shayn</a>, from Crossref’s support team. I’ve been fielding member questions about how to effectively deposit metadata and register content (among other things) for the past three years. In this post, I’ll take you through some of the improvements that Metadata Manager provides to those who currently use the <a href="https://0-apps-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webDeposit/">Web Deposit form</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/metadata-manager-members-represent/">We recently announced the launch of Metadata Manager</a>, a new tool from Crossref that makes it easier for you to submit robust, accurate, and thorough metadata for the content you register. Metadata Manager already covers journals and articles; more content types will be supported soon. It offers some extra features that will make your experience less stressful, make your metadata better, and ultimately make your content more discoverable.</p>
<p>Metadata Manager has the potential to improve your metadata registration experience in a number of ways:</p>
<ul>
<li>by correcting one-off errors in previously registered metadata</li>
<li>by directly allowing you to add references, license data, funder information, or any other ancillary metadata to items that have previously been registered</li>
<li>by updating Crossmark data, in the case of a retraction or withdrawal</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="login-first-not-last">Login first, not last</h2>
<p>With the Web Deposit form, you finish entering your metadata for a new issue of your journal, and then get asked for your password, and of course that&rsquo;s when you realize you&rsquo;ve forgotten it (it happens a lot!). With <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a>, the very first step is to log in, so you know your login credentials are accurate before you get down to the task of entering your metadata.</p>
<h2 id="easily-import-journals-or-add-new-ones">Easily import journals, or add new ones</h2>
<p>When you switch to Metadata Manager, you can import the journals already associated with your account. Simply go to the search bar on the Home screen, search for your journal by title, then click ’Add’. If you are registering your first article for a journal that you’ve not registered before, you can add the journal information on the Home screen, by clicking “New Publication”.</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/shayn-mm2.png" alt="metadata manager home screen" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<h2 id="adding-a-journal-doi">Adding a Journal DOI</h2>
<p>In the Web Deposit form, the Journal DOI is optional, as long as you include a valid ISSN. However, with Metadata Manager, <strong>a Journal DOI must be created for each journal you register</strong>. So, you need to enter a Journal DOI and a Journal URL for each of your journals before your deposits can be submitted. The Journal DOI won’t become active until you submit your first successful deposit for an article within that journal.</p>
<p>If you’ve never registered a Journal DOI before and are unsure what to use for your Journal DOI’s suffix, take a look at our suggested <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214669823-Constructing-your-identifiers">best practice for constructing DOI suffixes</a>.</p>
<h2 id="adding-new-articles">Adding new articles</h2>
<p>Once your journal is added, the process of adding articles in Metadata Manager should be familiar, as it’s similar to the Web Deposit form process. You type in or paste as plain text (without formatting) all your relevant, accurate, and thorough metadata into the appropriate fields in the form.</p>
<h2 id="save-your-work-as-you-go">Save your work as you go</h2>
<p>In Metadata Manager there is no need to complete a full issue’s worth of articles at once. And, you don’t need to worry about losing your progress if you accidentally close your browser window, or your laptop runs out of battery while you’re in the middle of a deposit. You can simply and easily ‘save-as-you-go’, one article at a time, until you’re ready to submit them all. You can even review your saved metadata to make sure there aren’t any errors before the deposit is finalized.</p>
<h2 id="other-metadata-fields-you-didn-t-know-you-needed-but-you-do">Other metadata fields you didn’t know you needed (but you do!)</h2>
<p>Have you ever wanted to add an abstract to your content’s metadata? How about license information, so that other organizations know what they can and can’t do with the work? Does your journal use article ID numbers instead of page numbers? These are all elements that can be added to Metadata Manager that were not available in the Web Deposit form. Additionally, you can add funding data, Similarity Check links, and <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426-Relationships-between-DOIs-and-other-objects">relationships between your articles and other content</a>. These types of metadata are hugely valuable for <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus-better-research-through-better-metadata/">building a robust, interconnected web of scholarly communication</a>.</p>
<h2 id="adding-references">Adding references</h2>
<p>Unlike the Web Deposit form, Metadata Manager allows you to easily add references to your article’s metadata—this is an important requirement for participating in our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/cited-by/">Cited-by</a> service.</p>
<p>To add references to an article’s metadata, you can copy and paste its reference list into the references field on the same screen as the rest of the article metadata (as per the image below).</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/shayn-mm1.png" alt="metadata manager home screen" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>Metadata Manager will match DOIs to those references (where available), and include the full list in your record. So, if you’ve been putting off participating in Cited-by because the reference deposit requirement was too much of a hassle, we hope this will help ease the way! The more references everyone registers, the more robust our Cited-by counts and Cited-by data become.</p>
<h2 id="edit-mistakes-without-having-to-re-enter-all-your-metadata">Edit mistakes without having to re-enter all your metadata</h2>
<p>Mistakes happen. Sometimes you put an author’s first name in the last name field. Sometimes you copy and paste some stray HTML tags into your abstract. You might break a link by leaving a space in the middle of a URL, or enter the first-page number as 3170 instead of 317.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With Metadata Manager you can fix any errors quickly and easily right in the interface, then just click to redeposit the article with its metadata corrected. You won’t need to re-enter all the metadata or worry about editing the XML files directly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ll have another blog post coming soon that will be devoted entirely to updating, correcting, or otherwise editing metadata for already-registered DOIs in Metadata Manager.</p>
<h2 id="find-out-immediately-if-your-registration-was-successful">Find out immediately if your registration was successful</h2>
<p>When you have finished adding the metadata for your articles, navigate to the “To deposit” section and click ‘Deposit’ to submit them. Instead of having to wait for your content to go through our processing queue, you’ll get immediate feedback. The number of Accepted and Failed deposits show immediately. Any articles which have failed are clearly marked with a red triangle icon and an explanation for the error. If you don’t understand an error message or how to correct the metadata, please contact us at <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a>.</p>
<p>To get started with Metadata Manager take a look at our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/metadata-manager/">full help documentation</a>.</p>
<hr />Resolutions 2019: Journal Title Transfers = Metadata Managerhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/resolutions-2019-journal-title-transfers-metadata-manager/
Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000Isaac Farleyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/resolutions-2019-journal-title-transfers-metadata-manager/<p>When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have&hellip;</p>
<p>Because we know—with a high level of certainty—that <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/shayn-smulyan/">Shayn</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/paul-davis/">Paul</a> and I will be spending the first few weeks of the year transferring the ownership of many journal titles. Last year we processed almost 60 journal transfer requests during this time, and we’re heading toward a similar number for 2019. There’s no objection; it’s a just a fact. We’re happy to do it, but there is another way.</p>
<p>Unlike previous years, we now have a tool that gives you the control to transfer titles without any intervention from the Crossref support team—<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a>. With just a few clicks, you, as the disposing publisher, can transfer your journal to the acquiring publisher yourself. Here’s how:</p>
<h3 id="transferring-your-journal-in-five-easy-steps-using-metadata-manager">Transferring your journal in five easy steps using Metadata Manager:</h3>
<p>1) Log into <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a> using your username and password (the same one you use for the Crossref Web Deposit form).</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/mm-home.png" alt="metadata manager home screen" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>2) Find the journal you’re transferring on your Metadata Manager workspace using the “search publications” box and click to load the journal’s container (or, dashboard).</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/mm-journal.png" alt="select journal" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>3) Within the journal container, select <strong>Transfer Title</strong> from the <strong>Action</strong> drop-down.</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/mm-action.png" alt="action on drop down menu" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>4) On the transfer title screen select the acquiring (destination) publisher’s name and DOI prefix of where ownership will be transferred to. Click <strong>Transfer</strong>.</p>
<p>(In addition to transferring ownership of the title itself, all existing journal article DOIs previously registered will also be transferred to the new owner using this mechanism. They will persist on their original prefix, but the acquiring publisher will be able to update the metadata associated with these DOIs).</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/mm-transfer.png" alt="transfer to new owner" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>5) <strong>Confirm</strong> the title transfer. It may take up to 24 hours for the transfer to be reflected within Metadata Manager, and we’ll send a courtesy email to the acquiring (destination) publisher’s technical contact when the transfer has been completed.</p>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/mm-confirm.png" alt="confirm transfer" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
<p>As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers—or anything else within Metadata Manager (the tool is in beta)–please let us know at <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a>. There’s also comprehensive <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/metadata-manager/">support documentation</a> available for Metadata Manager to help and guide you.</p>LIVE18: Roaring attendees, incomplete zebras, and missing tableclothshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/live18-roaring-attendees-incomplete-zebras-and-missing-tablecloths/
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000Rosa Clarkhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/live18-roaring-attendees-incomplete-zebras-and-missing-tablecloths/
<p>Running a smooth event is always the goal, but not always the case! No matter how well managed an event is, there is always a chance that things will not go according to plan. And so it was with LIVE18.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/notablecloth.png" alt="image of tables" width="325" >
</div>
<p>For the first day we were without the tablecloths we had ordered, which actually gave the room quite a nice, but unintentional, ‘rustic’ look. When they finally did arrive the following day, we realized we preferred the rustic look! Some of the merchandise we had prepared ended up sitting in Canadian Customs for a day and a half, which meant they arrived to us halfway through the first day of the event. Luckily attendees were distracted by the very cool ‘I heart metadata’ bags and didn’t seem to notice.</p>
<p>Unfortunately a significant number of registrants also had problems with Canadian regulations: they were denied visas to enter the country. Despite always trying to choose countries with international airport hubs and a welcoming policy, this was an unforseen blow.</p>
<p>But from setting up to take down, LIVE18 was truly a team effort. Even though many Crossref staff had traveled far and wide to get there, they all rallied to help the night before—hauling boxes through the streets of Toronto, stuffing attendee bags, hanging signage, and moving furniture around until 11:30 pm.</p>
<p>Because of these efforts&mdash;and despite the glitches&mdash;Crossref LIVE18 was a great success.</p>
<h2 id="how-good-is-your-metadata">How good is your metadata?</h2>
<p>That was the framing question at Crossref LIVE 18 in Toronto which this year focused on all things metadata. Over the course of the two-day event, we heard from guest speakers on the importance of collaboration, the significance of metadata to metrics, and what good metadata looks like. In our usual lively way, Crossref staff introduced a variety of new services, initiatives, and collaborations.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">Crossref LIVE</a> is helping surface key issues in the cleanup of metadata mismatch, after decades of the industry working in silos. I applaud Crossref for doing this. It’s great that we’re considering how to change the way we work and collaborate as an industry to make sure that we don’t run into metadata issues in this way again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>- Keynote speaker, Kristen Ratan, Co-Founder of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko)</em></p>
<p>In her keynote speech, ‘Publishing Infrastructure: The Good, The Bad, and The Expensive’, Coko’s Kristen Ratan challenged the industry to rethink its slow, inefficient, and expensive resignation to infrastructure; and instead consider how a collaborative approach to sharing expertise in developing community-owned infrastructure could be faster, more flexible, and less costly.</p>
<ul>
<li>View Kristen’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/V_Y5uSCL4ec">The Good, The Bad, and The Expensive</a></li>
</ul>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/cruse-ror.png" alt="image of Patricia Cruse" width="350" >
</div>
<h2 id="the-collaborations">The collaborations</h2>
<p>Collaboration was a running theme at LIVE18. Geoffrey Bilder provided an overview of Crossref’s selective collaborations; DataCite’s Patricia Cruse introduced <a href="https://ror.community/">ROR</a>, the community project to develop an open, sustainable, usable and unique identifier for every research organization in the world—and she got the crowd really engaged at the beginning of her talk by encouraging us all to ROAR out loud!; Clare Dean and Ravit David sketched out the evolution of <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata 2020</a>, and Shelley Stall from the AGU introduced the ways they are urging the scientific community to adopt FAIR data principles (using her first data collection as an 11-year-old as an example!)</p>
<ul>
<li>View Geoffrey’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/3_s6M9OKWp0">How Crossref (selectively) collaborates with others</a></li>
<li>View Patricia’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/TknM8YaTl8M">ROR: The Research Oragnization Registry</a> (Roar!) 🦁</li>
<li>View Clare and Ravit’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/QjvpQNwEmA8">Metadata 2020: This talk is sooo meta</a></li>
<li>View Shelley’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/VvZpTLjGWxs">My first data collection: Was it FAIR?</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="the-solutions">The solutions</h2>
<ul>
<li>Patricia Feeney, in the newly-created role of Head of Metadata, used a zebra to illustrate that not all of a publisher’s metadata is deposited with Crossref.</li>
</ul>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/zebras.png" alt="image of multicolor zebras" width="500px" /> </center></p>
<ul>
<li>View Patricia’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/RHUCf3p-TUk">I am the boss of your Metadata</a> (this one has the zebras) and also her talk on <a href="https://youtu.be/DHd6oRJiVE8">New content types in the works at Crossref</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="new-tools">New tools</h2>
<p>Jennifer Lin introduced <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a>, the new API that Crossref and DataCite have built together, enabling organizations to capture what happens to a DOI, including all of the places it is mentioned and links from/to. She also talked about <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Reports</a>, the new open dashboard to help members evaluate the completeness of their own metadata deposited with Crossref.</p>
<ul>
<li>View Jennifer’s talks on <a href="https://youtu.be/IkaNajvRXGY">Event Data</a>, and <a href="https://youtu.be/c3oo31VLsiA">Simplifying our services</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="the-community">The community</h2>
<p>We also heard from the community. Paul Dlug from the American Physical Society boldly gave his view on ‘Why Crossref sucks’, and, with a view to helping Crossref improve in key areas, surfaced issues that members struggle with. Ed Pentz, Executive Director, provided an overview of the direction that Crossref is headed towards. Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member &amp; Community Outreach, updated everyone on the expanding Crossref community and all the outreach activities her team conducts to engage them. Isaac Farley, new Technical Support Manager in the community team, told of his vision for moving to a more pubic, open, support model. Lisa Hart, Director of Finance &amp; Operations announcing the results of our members votes in this year&rsquo;s <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/">board election</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li>View Paul’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/TrYAsX4vjU0">Crossref sucks and how to cope!</a></li>
<li>View Ed’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/z3sZVVvSExg">Our strategic direction</a></li>
<li>View Ginny&rsquo;s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/RtaJq-NUFJE">Expanding our constituencies</a></li>
<li>View Isaac&rsquo;s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/4F8Cv9NTaRQ">Open Support: From 1:1 to everyone</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="the-perspectives">The perspectives</h3>
<p>Guest speakers provided a range of fascinating perspectives from across scholarly communications. Graham Nott, who works with eLife, outlined how they were making their JATS to Crossref schema conversion tool openly available to the community for use. Jodi Schneider, Assistant Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave us an in-depth look at problem citations, with a focus on retractions. Bianca Kramer from Utrecht University discussed Crossref metadata use in an open scholarly ecosystem. Stephanie Haustein from the University of Ottawa gave a researcher perspective on the problems with traditional journal metrics, and how they are dependent on metadata, which is essentially flawed. She outlined her efforts to increase metrics literacy, putting metrics in context with comrehensive metadata. Geoffrey Bilder talked about Dominika&rsquo;s work to evaluate our reference matching, and finally closed the show discussing the role of metadata in creating a provenance infrastucture, providing trustworthiness which is essential to progress the scholarly research cycle.</p>
<ul>
<li>View Graham’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/W0xaEw4FDjs">JATS at eLife</a></li>
<li>View Jodi’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/vCQexoeGqjY">Trouble at The Academy: Problem Citations</a></li>
<li>View Bianca’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/IOMn5Brzxzs">DOIs for whom? Crossref metadata in an open scholarly ecosystem</a></li>
<li>View Stephanie’s talk, <a href="https://youtu.be/tlwSt9P4feo">Good metadata + metrics literacy = better academia</a></li>
<li>View Geoffrey’s talks on <a href="https://youtu.be/sq00YZt8TxQ">Reference matching</a>, and <a href="https://youtu.be/MLCAVbwBL5A">Metadata as a signal of trust</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>As LIVE18 came to a close we took the opportunity to acknowledge and thank everyone once again for helping us reach the milestone of 100 million registered content items this September. Everyone took to the stage and waved their Crossref Bigger Ambitions flags.</p>
<h2 id="thank-you-to-everyone-who-participated-in-the-event-please-save-the-dates-for-live19-in-europe-on-13-14-november-2019">Thank you to everyone who participated in the event. Please save the dates for LIVE19 in Europe on 13-14 November, 2019!</h2>
<p><center><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/100milgroup-small.png" alt="group of people holding flags" width="600" class="img-responsive" /></center></p>
Reference matching: for real this timehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/reference-matching-for-real-this-time/
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000Dominika Tkaczykhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/reference-matching-for-real-this-time/<p>In my previous blog post, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match">Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match</a>, I compared four approaches for reference matching. The comparison was done using a dataset composed of automatically-generated reference strings. Now it&rsquo;s time for the matching algorithms to face the real enemy: the <strong>unstructured reference strings</strong> deposited with Crossref by some members. Are the matching algorithms ready for this challenge? Which algorithm will prove worthy of becoming the guardian of the mighty citation network? Buckle up and enjoy our second matching battle!</p>
<h2 id="tl-dr">TL;DR</h2>
<ul>
<li>I evaluated and compared four reference matching approaches: the legacy approach based on reference parsing, and three variants of search-based matching.</li>
<li>The dataset comprises 2,000 unstructured reference strings from the Crossref metadata.</li>
<li>The metrics are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall">precision and recall</a> calculated over the citation links. I also use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score">F1</a> as a standard single-number metric that combines precision and recall, weighing them equally.</li>
<li>The best variant of <strong>search-based matching outperforms the legacy approach in F1 (96.3% vs. 92.5%)</strong>, with the precision worse by only 0.9% (98.09% vs. 98.95%), and the recall better by 8.9% (94.56% vs. 86.85%).</li>
<li>Common causes of SBMV&rsquo;s errors are: incomplete/erroneous metadata of the target documents, and noise in the reference strings.</li>
<li>The results reported here generalize to the subset of references in Crossref that are deposited without the target DOI and are present in the form of unstructured strings.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
<p>In reference matching, we try to find the DOI of the document referenced by a given input reference. The input reference can have a structured form (a collection of metadata fields) and/or an unstructured form (a string formatted in a certain citation style).</p>
<p>In my <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match/">previous blog post</a>, I used reference strings generated automatically to compare four matching algorithms: Crossref&rsquo;s legacy approach based on reference parsing and three variations of search-based matching. The best algorithm turned out to be Search-Based Matching with Validation (SBMV). SBMV uses our <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">REST API&rsquo;s bibliographic search function</a> to select the candidate target documents, and a separate validation-scoring procedure to choose the final target document. The legacy approach and SBMV achieved very similar average precision, and SBMV was much better in average recall.</p>
<p>This comparison had important limitations, which affect the interpretation of these results.</p>
<p>First of all, the reference strings in the dataset might be too perfect. Since they were generated automatically from the Crossref metadata records, any piece of information present in the string, such as the title or the name of the author, will exactly match the information in Crossref&rsquo;s metadata. In such a case, a matcher comparing the string against the record can simply apply exact matching and everything should be fine.</p>
<p>In real life, however, we should expect all sorts of errors and noise in the reference strings. For example, a string might have been manually typed by a human, so it can have typos. The string might have been scraped from the PDF file, in which case it could have unusual unicode characters, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature">ligatures</a> or missing and extra spaces. A string can also have typical OCR errors, if it was extracted from a scan.</p>
<p>These problems are typical for messy real-life data, and our matching algorithms should be robust enough to handle them. However, when we evaluate and compare approaches using the perfect reference strings, the results won&rsquo;t tell us how well the algorithms handle harder, noisy cases. After all, even if you repeatedly win chess games against your father, it doesn&rsquo;t mean you will likely defeat Garry Kasparov (unless, of course, you are Garry Kasparov&rsquo;s child, in which case, please pass on our regards to your dad!).</p>
<p>Even though I attempted to make the data more similar to the noisy real-life data by simulating some of the possible errors (typos, missing/extra spaces) in two styles, this might not be enough. We simply don&rsquo;t know the typical distribution of the errors, or even what all the possible errors are, so our data was probably still far from the real, noisy reference strings.</p>
<p>The differences in the distributions are a second major issue with the previous experiment. To build the dataset, I used a random sample from Crossref metadata, so the distribution of the cited item types (journal paper, conference proceeding, book chapter, etc.) reflects the overall distribution in our collection. However, the distribution in real life might be different if, for example, journal papers are on average cited more often than conference proceedings.</p>
<p>Similarly, the distribution of the citation styles is most likely different. To generate the reference strings, I used 11 styles distributed uniformly, while the real distribution most likely contains more styles and is skewed.</p>
<p>All these issues can be summarized as: <strong>the data used in my previous experiment is different from the data our matching algorithms have to deal with in the production system</strong>. Why is this important? Because in such a case, <strong>the evaluation results do not reflect the real performance in our system</strong>, just like the child&rsquo;s score on the math exam says nothing about their score on the history test. We can hope my previous results accurately showed the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm, but the estimations could be far off.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, can we do better? Sure!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This time, instead of automatically-generated reference strings, I will use real reference strings found in the Crossref metadata. This will give us a much better picture of the matching algorithms and their real-life performance.</p>
<h2 id="evaluation">Evaluation</h2>
<p>This time the <strong>evaluation dataset is composed of 2,000 unstructured reference strings from the Crossref metadata</strong>, along with the target true DOIs. The dataset was prepared mostly manually:</p>
<ol>
<li>First, I drew a random sample of 100,000 metadata records from the system.</li>
<li>Second, I iterated over all sampled items, and extracted those unstructured reference strings, that do not have the DOI provided by the member.</li>
<li>Next, I randomly sampled 2,000 reference strings.</li>
<li>Finally, I assigned a target DOI (or null) to each reference string. This was done by verifying DOIs returned by the algorithms and/or manual searching.</li>
</ol>
<p>The metrics this time are based on the citation links. A citation link points from the reference (or the document containing the reference) to the referenced (target) document.</p>
<p>When we apply a matching algorithm to a set of reference strings in our collection, we get a set of citation links between our documents. I will call those citation links <strong>returned links</strong>.</p>
<p>On the other hand, in our collection we have real, <strong>true links</strong> between the documents. In the best-case scenario, the set of true links and the set of returned links are identical. But we don&rsquo;t live in a perfect world and our matching algorithms make mistakes.</p>
<p>To measure how close the returned links are to the true links, I used precision, recall and F1. This time they are calculated over all citation links in the dataset. More specifically:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Precision</strong> is the fraction of the returned links that are correct. Precision answers the question: if I see a citation link A-&gt;B in the output of a matcher, how certain can I be that paper A actually cites paper B?</li>
<li><strong>Recall</strong> is the percentage of true links that were returned by the algorithm. Recall answers the question: if paper A cites paper B and B is in the collection, how certain can I be that the matcher&rsquo;s output contains the citation link A-&gt;B?</li>
<li><strong>F1</strong> is the harmonic mean of precision and recall.</li>
</ul>
<p>In the previous experiment, I also used precision, recall and F1, but they were calculated for each target document and then averaged. This time precision, recall and F1 are not averaged but simply calculated over all citation links. This is a more natural approach, since now the dataset comprises isolated reference strings rather than target documents, and in practice each target document has at most one incoming reference.</p>
<p>I tested the same four approaches as before:</p>
<ul>
<li>the <strong>legacy approach</strong>, based on reference parsing</li>
<li><strong>SBM with a simple threshold</strong>, which searches for the reference string in the search engine and returns the first hit, if its relevance score exceeds the predefined threshold</li>
<li><strong>SBM with a normalized threshold</strong>, which searches for the reference string in the search engine and returns the first hit, if its relevance score divided by the string length exceeds the predefined threshold</li>
<li><strong>SBMV</strong>, which first applies SBM with a normalized threshold to select a number of candidate items, and a separate validation procedure is used to select the final target item</li>
</ul>
<p>All the thresholds are parameters which have to be set prior to the matching. The thresholds used in the experiments were chosen using a separate dataset, as the values maximizing the F1 of each algorithm.</p>
<h2 id="results">Results</h2>
<p>The plot shows the overall results of all tested approaches:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/matching_comparison_real_data.png"
alt="overall comparison of reference matching algorithms on real dataset" width="500px"/>
</figure>
<p><br /></p>
<p>The exact values are also given in the table (the best result for each metric is bolded):</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>precision</th>
<th>recall</th>
<th>F1</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>legacy approach</td>
<td><strong>0.9895</strong></td>
<td>0.8685</td>
<td>0.9251</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SBM (simple threshold)</td>
<td>0.8686</td>
<td>0.8191</td>
<td>0.8431</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SBM (normalized threshold)</td>
<td>0.7712</td>
<td>0.9121</td>
<td>0.8358</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SBMV</td>
<td>0.9809</td>
<td><strong>0.9456</strong></td>
<td><strong>0.9629</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>As we can see, the legacy approach is the best in precision, slightly outperforming SBMV. In recall, SBMV is clearly the best, which also decided about its victory over the legacy approach in F1.</p>
<p>How do these results compare to the results from my previous blog post? The overall trends (the legacy approach slightly outperforms SBMV in precision, and SBMV outperforms the legacy approach in recall and F1) are the same. The most important differences are: 1) on the real dataset SBM without validation is worse than the legacy approach, and 2) this time the algorithms achieved much higher recall. These differences are most likely related to the difference in data distributions explained before.</p>
<h3 id="sbmv-s-strengths-and-weaknesses">SBMV&rsquo;s strengths and weaknesses</h3>
<p>Let&rsquo;s look at a few example cases where SBMV successfully returned the correct DOI, while the legacy approach failed.</p>
<pre><code>Lundqvist D, Flykt A, Ohman A: The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces - KDEF, CD ROM from Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Psychology section, Karolinska Institutet. 1998
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1037/t27732-000">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1037/t27732-000</a></p>
<p>The target item is a dataset, which means unusual metadata fields and an unusual reference string.</p>
<pre><code>Schminck, A. , ‘The Beginnings and Origins of the “Macedonian” Dynasty’ in J. Burke and R. Scott , eds., Byzantine Macedonia: Identity, Image and History (Melbourne, 2000), 61–8.
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1163/9789004344730_006">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1163/9789004344730_006</a></p>
<p>This is an example of a book chapter. The reference string contains special quotes and dash characters.</p>
<pre><code>R. Schneider,On the Aleksandrov-Fenchel inequality, inDiscrete Geometry and Convexity (J. E. Goodman, E. Lutwak, J. Malkevitch and R. Pollack, eds.), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences440 (1985), 132–141.
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1985.tb14547.x">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1985.tb14547.x</a></p>
<p>In this case, spaces are missing in the reference string, which might be problematic for the parsing.</p>
<pre><code>R. B. Husar andE. M. Sparrow, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer11, 1206 (1968).
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/0017-9310(68)90036-7">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/0017-9310(68)90036-7</a></p>
<p>This is another example of a reference string with missing spaces.</p>
<pre><code>F. Cappello, A. Geist, W. Gropp, S. Kale, B. Kramer, and M. Snir. Toward exascale resilience: 2014 update. Supercomputing frontiers and innovations, 1(1), 2014.
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14529/jsfi140101">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14529/jsfi140101</a></p>
<p>In this case authors are missing in the Crossref metadata.</p>
<pre><code>Li KZ, Shen XT, Li HJ, Zhang SY, Feng T, Zhang LL. Ablation of the Carbon/carbon Composite Nozzle-throats in a Small Solid Rocket Motor[J]. Carbon, 2011, 49: 1 208–1 215
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/j.carbon.2010.11.037">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/j.carbon.2010.11.037</a></p>
<p>Here we have unexpected spaces inside page numbers.</p>
<pre><code>N. Kaloper, A. Lawrence and L. Sorbo, An Ignoble Approach to Large Field Inflation, JCAP 03 (2011) 023 [ arXiv:1101.0026 ] [ INSPIRE ].
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1088/1475-7516/2011/03/023">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1088/1475-7516/2011/03/023</a></p>
<p>In this case we have an acronym of the journal name and additional arXiv id.</p>
<pre><code>KrönerE. ?Stress space and strain space continuum mechanics?, Phys. Stat. Sol. (b), 144 (1987) 39?44.
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1002/pssb.2221440104">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1002/pssb.2221440104</a></p>
<p>This reference string has a missing space, a missing word in the title, and incorrectly encoded special characters.</p>
<pre><code>Suyemoto K. L., (1998) The functions of self-mutilationClinical Psychology Review 18(5): 531–554
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/s0272-7358(97)00105-0">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/s0272-7358(97)00105-0</a></p>
<p>In this case the space is missing between the title and the journal name.</p>
<pre><code>Ono , N. 2011 Stable and fast update rules for independent vector analysis based on auxiliary function technique Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics 189 192
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1109/aspaa.2011.6082320">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1109/aspaa.2011.6082320</a></p>
<p>The parsing can also have problems with missing punctuation, like in this case.</p>
<pre><code>Hybertsen M.S., Witzigmann B., Alam M.A., Smith R.K. (2002) 1 113
</code></pre>
<p>matched to <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1023/a:1020732215449">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1023/a:1020732215449</a></p>
<p>In this case both title and journal name are missing from the reference string.</p>
<p>We can see from these examples that SBMV is fairly robust and able to deal with a small amount of noise in the metadata and reference strings.</p>
<p>What about the errors SBMV made? From the perspective of citation links, we have two types of errors:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>False positives</strong>: incorrect links returned by the algorithm.</li>
<li><strong>False negatives</strong>: links that should have been returned but weren&rsquo;t.</li>
</ul>
<p>When we apply SBMV instead of the legacy approach, the fraction of false positives within the returned links increases from 1.05% to 1.91%, and the fraction of false negatives within the true links decreases from 13.15% to 5.44%. This means with SBMV:</p>
<ul>
<li>1.91% of the links in the algorithm&rsquo;s output are incorrect</li>
<li>5.44% of the true links are not returned by the algorithm</li>
</ul>
<p>We can also classify all the references in the dataset into several categories, based on the values of true and returned DOIs:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/matching_references_errors.png"
alt="references errors distribution" width="800px"/>
</figure>
<p>We have the following categories:</p>
<ul>
<li>References matched to correct DOIs (1129 cases, returned and true blue)</li>
<li>References correctly not matched to anything (791 cases, returned and true white)</li>
<li>References not matched to anything, when they should be (58 cases, returned white, true grey)</li>
<li>References matched to wrong DOIs (7 cases, returned red, true yellow)</li>
<li>References matched to something, when they shouldn&rsquo;t be matched to anything (15 cases, returned black, true white)</li>
</ul>
<p>Note that in terms of these categories, precision is equal to:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/matching_precision.png"
alt="precision" width="200px"/>
</figure>
<p>And recall is equal to:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/matching_recall.png"
alt="recall" width="200px"/>
</figure>
<p>What are the most common causes of SBMV&rsquo;s errors?</p>
<ul>
<li>Incomplete or incorrect Crossref metadata. Even a perfect reference string formatted in the most popular citation style will not be matched, if the target record in the Crossref collection has many missing or incorrect fields.</li>
<li>Similarly, missing or incorrect information in the reference string is very problematic for the matchers.</li>
<li>Errors/noise in the reference string, such as:
<ul>
<li>HTML/XML markup not stripped from the string</li>
<li>multiple references mixed in one string</li>
<li>spacing issues and typos</li>
</ul></li>
<li>In a few cases a document related to the real target was matched, such as the book instead of its chapter, or the conference proceedings paper instead of the thesis.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="limitations">Limitations</h2>
<p>The most important limitation is the size of the dataset. Every item had to be verified manually, which significantly limited the possibility of creating a large set and also using a lot of independent sets.</p>
<p>Finally, the numbers reported here still don&rsquo;t reflect the overall precision and recall of the current links in the Crossref metadata. This is because:</p>
<ol>
<li>we still use the legacy approach for matching,</li>
<li>some references are deposited along with the target DOIs and are not matched by Crossref, these links are not analyzed here, and</li>
<li>in Crossref we have both unstructured and structured references, and in this experiment only the unstructured ones were tested.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="what-s-next">What&rsquo;s next?</h2>
<p>The next experiment will be related to the structured references. Similarly as here, I will try to estimate the performance of the search-based matching approach and compare it to the performance of the legacy approach.</p>
<p>The evaluation framework, evaluation data and experiments related to the reference matching are available in the repository <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation">https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation</a>. Future experiments will be added there as well.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation">https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation</a> also contains the Python implementation of the SBMV algorithm. The Java implementation of SBMV is available in the repository <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/search-based-reference-matcher">https://github.com/CrossRef/search-based-reference-matcher</a>.</p>Phew - its been quite a yearhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/phew-its-been-quite-a-year/
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/phew-its-been-quite-a-year/<p>As the end of the year approaches it’s useful to look back and reflect on what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months—a lot! To be honest, there were some things we didn’t get done—or didn’t make as much progress with as we hoped—but that happens when you have an ambitious agenda. However, we also got some things done that we didn’t expect to or that weren’t even on our radar at the end of 2017—this is inevitable as the research and scholarly communications landscape is rapidly changing.</p>
<p>In my <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-year-in-the-life-of-crossref/">blog post</a> from the beginning of the year, the key projects I highlighted were <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/plus-service/">Metadata Plus</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/org-id-a-recap-and-a-hint-of-things-to-come/">Organization IDs</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/">Grant IDs</a> and <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org">Metadata 2020</a>, and that richer metadata and more content types were key goals. We did make very good progress on all of these projects as reported below.</p>
<p>For 2018 we were operating in the framework of the four strategic themes, or areas of focus, developed by the board and staff. These are: 1) Simplifying and enriching our services; 2) Improving our metadata; 3) Expanding constituencies, and 4) Selectively collaborating and partnering. These themes will also be guiding us in 2019.</p>
<h2 id="simplifying-and-enriching-our-services">Simplifying and enriching our services</h2>
<h3 id="upgrading-our-tools">Upgrading our tools</h3>
<p>Over the past year, we’ve been busy streamlining our processes, developing new tools and adding new services. A key new tool is <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a> which supports the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration/">Content Registration service</a> by offering a simpler, more user-friendly, non-technical way to register and update metadata. It provides lots of context-sensitive help, registers content immediately, in real time, and provides guidance on how to make corrections—thereby ensuring each deposit is successful. Metadata Manager currently supports journal deposits (we would have liked to add more in 2018) but we will be adding other content types on 2019.</p>
<h3 id="upgrading-our-services">Upgrading our services</h3>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/">Crossref metadata</a> has always been open through a number of interfaces without restriction, but this year we introduced an option for extra support and functionality, through <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/plus-service/">Metadata Plus</a>. Metadata Plus provides guaranteed uptime, snapshots of the complete set of metadata and enhanced support for organizations (members or not) that want to use Crossref metadata in their own services and systems.</p>
<h3 id="improving-the-member-experience-new-membership-terms">Improving the member experience: New membership terms</h3>
<p>This year we began to redesign the member experience and have made a lot of improvements to the sign-up and onboarding process, the most significant of which is the new click-through membership terms, introduced in July for new members and coming into effect for existing members in March 2019, which is proving to be a huge time saver for both our members and our team.</p>
<h2 id="improving-our-metadata">Improving our metadata</h2>
<p>Our objective this year was to better communicate what metadata best practice is, to equip our members with all the data and tools they need to meet this best practice, and to achieve closer cooperation from service providers.</p>
<h3 id="best-practice-tools-participation-reports">Best practice tools: Participation Reports</h3>
<p>Released in Beta in August this year, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Reports</a> provides a dashboard that gives a clear picture of the metadata that each member provides. This is a useful visualization of metadata that has long been available via our public REST API. Members can see where the gaps in the metadata are and get information on how to fill those gaps.</p>
<h3 id="communicating-metadata-best-practice-data-citations">Communicating metadata best practice: Data Citations</h3>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/why-data-citation-matters-to-publishers-and-data-repositories/">The importance of linking data</a> with literature can’t be understated. Research integrity and reproducibility depend on it. We&rsquo;re committed to exposing the links between the literature and the data or software that supports it, and earlier this year we partnered with <a href="https://www.datacite.org/">DataCite</a> to make this a reality. All the data citations coming in from Crossref and DataCite are being pulled into Event Data.</p>
<h3 id="equipping-members-with-all-the-data-event-data">Equipping members with all the data: Event Data</h3>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a> reached technical readiness. Event Data captures and records “events” such as comments, links, shares, bookmarks, and references. It provides open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every event.</p>
<h2 id="expand-constituencies">Expand constituencies</h2>
<p>Crossref currently has <span class='withcommas'>13840</span>
members in 118 countries. With that comes the need to increasingly and proactively work with emerging markets as they start to share research outputs globally.</p>
<h3 id="ambassador-program">Ambassador program</h3>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/ambassadors/">The Crossref Ambassador program</a> launched in January and now has a team of 16 trusted contacts who work within our communities (as librarians, researchers, publishers, and innovators) around the world. They share great enthusiasm and belief in our work. We provide them with training and support, and they help us improve education about global research infrastructure in general and the opportunities that are enabled through richer metadata.</p>
<h3 id="funders-and-grant-identifiers">Funders and grant identifiers</h3>
<p>I’m very happy to report that the Crossref board approved grants as a new content type to be rolled out in 2019 - we made faster progress on this than expected. The proposal for grant identifiers was developed by staff in collaboration with the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/funders/">Crossref Funder Advisory Group</a> and the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/committees/membership-and-fees/">Membership and Fees Committee</a>. This means that funders will be joining Crossref and registering a standard set of metadata and a persistence identifier - a DOI - for their grants.</p>
<h2 id="selectively-collaborate-and-partner-with-others">Selectively collaborate and partner with others</h2>
<p>So that our alliances with others have the greatest impact, we have aligned our strategic plans for scholarly infrastructure with others. Some of these alliances are led or driven by Crossref and with others we are involved but not leading.</p>
<h3 id="ror">ROR</h3>
<p>We are working with the <a href="https://www.cdlib.org/">California Digital Library</a>, <a href="https://www.datacite.org/">DataCite</a> and <a href="https://www.digital-science.com/">Digital Science</a> as the Steering group for <a href="https://ror.community/">ROR</a> - the Research Organization Registry - which is a new, community-led project that is developing an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for research organizations based on the work done by the <a href="https://orcid.org/content/organization-identifier-working-group">Organization Identifier Working Group</a> in 2017 and 2018.</p>
<h3 id="metadata-2020">Metadata 2020</h3>
<p><a href="www.metadata2020.org">Metadata 2020</a> is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society. Over 140 volunteers—including publishers, librarians, researchers, platforms/tools, and other stakeholders—from 86 organizations, are working in six project groups. The projects are very strategically focused, looking at key issues like researcher communications, incentives, and shared best practices.</p>
<p>I can’t close off the year without mentioning the incredible milestone we reached this September when <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/">the 100th million content item was registered</a> with Crossref. This was made possible by our members’ and the wider community’s commitment and contribution, so once again, thank you.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Roll on 2019!</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />Newly approved membership terms will replace existing agreementhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/newly-approved-membership-terms-will-replace-existing-agreement/
Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/newly-approved-membership-terms-will-replace-existing-agreement/<p>In its July 2018 meeting, the Crossref <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance">Board</a> voted unanimously to approve and introduce a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/terms">new set of membership terms</a>. At the same meeting, the board also voted to change the description of membership eligibility in our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/bylaws">Bylaws</a>, officially broadening our remit beyond publishers, in line with current practice and positioning us for future growth.</p>
<h2 id="tl-dr">Tl;dr</h2>
<p>It’s a very good thing to have clearer terms; we want everyone to understand what Crossref is about and what you’re getting into. It’s a material change so we will be notifying members by direct email in December. Nobody needs to sign anything as the new terms are not signed, but are click-through acceptances on application, and that process is already in effect for new applicants. The new terms come into effect on 1st March 2019 for existing members and no action is needed.</p>
<ul>
<li>If you&rsquo;re a <strong>sponsored member</strong> you&rsquo;ll have a slightly adapted message soon as we work with the sponsoring organizations.</li>
<li>If you&rsquo;re an NGO or US State Actor you will recieve a slightly adapted message.</li>
</ul>
<div class="blue-highlight">
<span>This post is for background explanation and information. We will email existing members directly, but no acceptance or signature&mdash;nor any action&mdash;will be needed.</span>
</div>
<h2 id="why-are-we-updating-the-terms">Why are we updating the terms?</h2>
<p>Being almost 20 years old the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/2018-agreement">old agreement</a> is out-of-date with current practice and technology, and has become quite long and confusing, especially for applicants for whom English is not their first language. Specific reasons include:</p>
<h3 id="1-to-improve-efficiency">1. To improve efficiency</h3>
<p>Over the years we’ve had feedback that our application process is too long and involved. The membership agreement used to be signed manually by each new Crossref member, often days after they applied. We also now process around 180 new members each month which is too many for a wholly manual process managed by just one person.</p>
<h3 id="2-to-clarify-the-wording">2. To clarify the wording</h3>
<p>People would tell us that the agreement is too long and confusing, especially when English is not their first language. There are often questions about the “legalese” style of language that takes up too much time in back-and-forth discussions to ensure everyone has understood. Also, the main structure of the agreement has been in place for over a decade and needs updating to avoid confusion and to align with up-to-date language, services, technologies, and current practices.</p>
<h3 id="3-to-emphasize-the-community-aspect-and-our-members-obligations">3. To emphasize the community aspect and our members’ obligations</h3>
<p>It is quite a commitment to participate fully in Crossref, and we want people to understand up-front what their obligations are as part of the collective membership. And also to realize what value they are receiving as well as contributing to other members. We needed clearer terms so that every organization can understand what they are getting into.</p>
<p>Additionally, moving from signing contracts to click-through acceptance of standard terms emphasizes that Crossref is not a service provider or vendor. We are a not-for-profit community organization. We don’t have the resources to negotiate and keep track of individual custom agreements.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-changing-step-by-step">What’s changing, step-by-step</h2>
<p>We consulted with former and current legal counsel, the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/committees/membership-and-fees">Membership &amp; Fees Committee</a>, and also with the M&amp;F organizations individually. We have also absorbed a lot of feedback from many other members of all kinds and sizes.</p>
<h3 id="for-new-members">For new members</h3>
<p>The manually-signed membership agreement has already&mdash;for new members&mdash; been turned into a set of click-through terms that organizations agree to as part of the initial application process. It is no longer a separate document that needs to be signed or countersigned. This will simplify the application process for both new applicants and our staff.</p>
<h3 id="for-existing-members">For existing members</h3>
<p>The new membership terms will come into effect for existing members on March 1st, 2019. Because this is a material change to the terms, we will be emailing members with more information but it’s important to note that no action is necessary from existing members. The new terms will replace the old terms automatically.</p>
<p>The table below sets out clause-by-clause the precise changes. Here is the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/2018-agreement/">2018 membership agreement</a> and the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/terms">new terms in full</a>.</p>
<h3 id="the-nitty-gritty-details">The nitty-gritty details</h3>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Topic</th>
<th>New section</th>
<th>Old section</th>
<th>Summary of change(s)</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Overall</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td>Eliminates legalese in favor of plain English. Updates defined terms to current usage. Shifts from execution by signature to acceptance by affirmative action.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Introduction</td>
<td>Background</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>Updates description of Crossref’s activities to be current. Provides for a new applicant’s acceptance of Terms upon acceptance of application by Crossref and payment of first annual fee.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Members’ rights</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>2(a)</td>
<td>Streamlines wording; eliminates reference to right to recommend working committee members.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Members’ obligations</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2(b)</td>
<td>Significant revision. Old 2(b) mentioned only payment of fees and appointment of a contact person. New Sec. 2 aims to capture all of a Member’s operational obligations in one place.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Metadata deposits</td>
<td>2(a), (b)</td>
<td>3(a)(i)</td>
<td>Updates language regarding metadata deposits to current terminology and practice.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Rights to content</td>
<td>2(c)</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>Streamlines wording.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Registering identifiers</td>
<td>2(d)</td>
<td>3(a)ii)</td>
<td>Streamlines the language around registering identifiers.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Linking</td>
<td>2(e)</td>
<td>3(a)(iii)</td>
<td>States, in clearer language, the obligation to embed identifiers.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Reference linking</td>
<td>2(f)</td>
<td>3(a)(iv)</td>
<td>Eliminates outdated provision on Cross-Linking; replaces with a best efforts covenant to engage in Reference Linking.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Display identifiers</td>
<td>2(g)</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>Adds an obligation to comply with Crossref’s display guidelines and ensure each identifier is hyperlinked to be citable.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Maintaining and updating metadata</td>
<td>2(h)</td>
<td>3(b)</td>
<td>Streamlines language. Adds obligation to maintain the URL and the accuracy of identifier data. Adds common examples of failure to maintain and update metadata.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Archiving</td>
<td>2(i)</td>
<td>3(d)</td>
<td>Adds link to examples of third-party archive providers. Adds option for Crossref to point to a “defunct DOI” page. Inserts best efforts obligation to contract with a third-party archive.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Content-specific obligations</td>
<td>2(j)</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>Adds reference to Crossref’s content type rules and obligation to comply.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fees</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>2(b)</td>
<td>Old agreement referred generally to “all membership dues and any charges or fees as established by the Board from time to time and set forth on the PILA Site.” New Section 3 aims to summarize the categories of fees associated with membership, including a reference to service fees for optional services if and when elected by the Member. Adds Member obligation to cover wire transfer fees/other payment costs.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>General license</td>
<td>4(a)</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>Clarifies that the license grant covers only metadata and identifiers “corresponding to such Member’s Content.”</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Metadata rights &amp; limitations</td>
<td>4(b)</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>Significantly streamlines wording.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Crossref’s IP</td>
<td>4(c)</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>Significantly streamlines wording.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Distribution of metadata</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>9(b)</td>
<td>Updates language regarding Crossref’s rights to distribute Metadata. Adds an explicit carveout for a Member’s reference distribution preference.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>7, 8, 9(a)</td>
<td>Deletes extensive provision relating to obsolete “Clean-Up” and “Reverse Look-Up” services. Deletes provisions relating to obsolete “caching and transfer” activities, and local hosting.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Use of marks</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>Substantially rewritten, including to reflect Crossref’s more permissive approach to use of its logo.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Maintenance of the Crossref Infrastructure</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>[No analog.]</td>
<td>Adds covenant of Crossref to maintain the Crossref Infrastructure.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Term</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>Eliminates the concept of automatically renewing 12-month terms. Replaces with a perpetual term that continues until superseded by an amended version.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Termination of membership</td>
<td>9(a)</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>Provides for termination by the member upon written notice, rather than 90 days’ written notice, to align with the Bylaws. Adds a for-cause termination right by the Member, and corresponding right to receive a refund of fees. Sets out certain bases for termination of membership by Crossref, consistent with the Bylaws.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Appeal rights</td>
<td>9(b)</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>No material change.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Effect of termination of membership</td>
<td>9(c)</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>Adds refund right for for-cause terminations.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Enforcement</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>Replaces “Crossref has the right but not the obligation to enforce the terms of this Agreement …” with “Crossref shall take reasonable steps to enforce these Terms … .”</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Governing law; venue</td>
<td>11</td>
<td>14(a)</td>
<td>Keeps New York as choice of law, but moves forum to Boston, nearer to Crossref’s US location.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Disputes</td>
<td>12</td>
<td>14(b)</td>
<td>No material change (but note venue provision moved to 11(a)).</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>Eliminates mutual “warranty” provision; addresses rights to content and anti-infringement under other provisions.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Indemnification</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>16</td>
<td>Removes concept that Member is indemnifying other Crossref Members. Streamlines and cleans up the indemnity language.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Limitation of Liability</td>
<td>14</td>
<td>17</td>
<td>Adds explicit reference to the Crossref Infrastructure.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Assignment</td>
<td>16(c)</td>
<td>22</td>
<td>Removed language providing that Crossref’s consent to assignment of the Terms shall not be unreasonably delayed or conditioned.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Amendment</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>2(c)</td>
<td>Old: “The Board shall have the power to modify the terms of this Agreement by publishing amended versions that will automatically supersede prior versions … . PILA will use its reasonable discretion in deciding if a modification is material, and if so will provide written notice” to the Member of the material changes. New: “These Terms may be amended by Crossref, via updated Terms posted on the Website and emailed to each Member not less than sixty (60) days prior to effectiveness. By using the Crossref Infrastructure after the effective date of any such amendment hereto, the Member accepts the amended Terms.”</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Data privacy</td>
<td>19</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>Adds a GDPR-compliant privacy provision; adds a linked reference to Crossref’s new Privacy Policy.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Compliance</td>
<td>20</td>
<td>N/A</td>
<td>Adds a mutual compliance covenant and an OFAC/sanctions representation.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Various legal “boilerplate” terms (taxes, waiver, independent contractor</td>
<td>15-17</td>
<td>18-28</td>
<td>Streamlined; replaced with more contemporary formulations; eliminated some excess verbiage.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2 id="thanks-for-reading-this-far">Thanks for reading this far!</h2>
<p>Please contact our <a href="mailto:member@crossref.org">member experience team</a> with any questions.</p>Updates to our by-lawshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/updates-to-our-by-laws/
Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/updates-to-our-by-laws/<p>Good governance is important and something that Crossref thinks about regularly so the board frequently discusses the topic, and this year even more so. At the November 2017 meeting there was a motion passed to create an ad-hoc Governance Committee to develop a set of governance-related questions/recommendations. The Committee has met regularly this year and the following questions are under deliberation regarding term limits, role of the Nominating Committee, implications of contested elections, and more.</p>
<p>The full motion to create the committee is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ad hoc Governance Committee should discuss and make specific recommendations (including where necessary proposing appropriate by-law amendments) about (i) the timing of the annual election of members and whether the newly elected Board can take office a fixed period after the election results are finalized; (ii) the role and responsibilities of the Nominating Committee and its relationship to the Board; (iii) the implications of having contested Board elections; (iv) the election of officers, Executive Committee members, and committee chairs, and v) options and required changes for board members to represent specific constituencies (e.g. based on membership types).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Governance Committee members are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Paul Peters (Hindawi and Board Chair)</li>
<li>Scott Delman (ACM and Board Treasurer)</li>
<li>Chris Shillum (Elsevier and Executive Committee member)</li>
<li>Mark Patterson (eLife)</li>
<li>Ed Pentz (Crossref Executive Director)</li>
<li>Lisa Hart (Crossref Finance &amp; Operations Director)</li>
<li>Emily Cooke (Pierce Atwood, legal counsel).</li>
</ul>
<p>The committee’s goal was to try to maintain and increase transparency; consider practicality and impact of any changes and ensure continuity and balance.</p>
<p>At the March meeting the committee provided an overview of the issues they had discussed. There was consensus to accept the committee’s recommendation to address all of the governance matters comprehensively at the July 2018 meeting.</p>
<p>Discussions resulted in two changes to our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/bylaws/">by-laws</a>:</p>
<h2 id="1-membership-eligibility">1. Membership eligibility</h2>
<p>To provide clarity around membership qualification, we resolved to amend Article I Section 1 by replacing the text in its entirety with the following text:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Membership in Crossref shall be open to any organization that publishes professional and scholarly materials and content and otherwise meets the terms and conditions of membership established from time to time by the Board of Directors, and to such other entities as the Board of Directors shall determine from time to time.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="2-start-date-of-board-terms">2. Start date of board terms</h2>
<p>We also resolved to amend Article V Section 4 to replace the phrase “on the day after” with the phrase “during the next calendar quarter immediately following”. This allows the Board to meet directly ahead of Crossref’s Annual Meeting and Board election (from 2019) instead of directly after.</p>
<p>The first change captures the fact that we have a very broad community beyond what is seen as traditional publishers, who themselves do not solely identify as publishers anymore. It reflects how our membership has evolved, and also includes organizations that publish that aren’t publishers (universities, government agencies, etc.)</p>
<p>The second change was a practical one. As Crossref had its first contested election in 2017, and in 2018 as well, it seemed unreasonable to have a brand new Board meet the day after the election, especially when there is potential for officers to not be re-elected. The old by-laws were very specific about holding the Board meeting the day after the election. With this change, starting with the March meeting, the new Board will have a full calendar year of meetings, which seems more practical, and we will establish a process for the election of officers.</p>
<p>During that meeting we deliberated the following questions/recommendations raised by the committee:</p>
<ul>
<li>Development of a policy on canvassing/campaigning by candidates in Board elections;</li>
<li>Development of policies on nominations to the positions of Chair, Treasurer, Executive Committee members, the Nominating Committee Chair, and the Audit Committee Chair;</li>
<li>Analysis of how best to achieve balance and representation on the Board going forward (designated seats and/or a binding Board remit to the Nominating Committee);</li>
<li>Analysis as to whether to impose term limits on board members;</li>
<li>Analysis as to how best to handle independent nominations to the Board (eliminate the option, or improve the process); and</li>
<li>Review of our governing documents’ provisions on vacancies, to confirm that the Board follows the required steps on the filling of vacancies.</li>
</ul>
<p>At the November 2018 Board meeting&mdash;following Crossref LIVE18&mdash;there were two more amendments to the bylaws:</p>
<h2 id="3-removal-of-independant-nominations">3. Removal of independant nominations</h2>
<p>To remove Art. V II Sec. 3 on independent nominations. This change reflects the consensus that there is no need for independent nominations with the introduction of contested elections.</p>
<h2 id="4-membership-start-date-of-record">4. Membership start date of record</h2>
<p>To amend Art. I Sec. 2 to amend language dealing with record date of membership. This is a practical change following the July 2018 introduction of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/terms">new membership terms</a> which are click-through online terms and don&rsquo;t need counter-signatures.</p>
<p>The new Board will resume the discussion on designated seats at our March 2019 meeting.</p>Data Citation: what and how for publishershttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citation-what-and-how-for-publishers/
Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citation-what-and-how-for-publishers/<p>We’ve mentioned <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/why-data-citation-matters-to-publishers-and-data-repositories">why data citation is important to the research community</a>. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get into the ‘how’. This part is important, as citing data in a standard way helps those citations be recognised, tracked, and used in a host of different services.</p>
<p>This week <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1038/sdata.2018.259">A Data Citation Roadmap for Scientific Publishers</a> was published in <a href="http://0-www.nature.com.libus.csd.mu.edu/scientificdata">Scientific Data</a>. This roadmap is the outcome of a collaboration between different publishers that worked on identifying all steps you need to take as a publisher to implement data citation. If you want to know more about establishing a data policy, capturing data citations at the point of submission, or tagging data citations in your XML, we recommend you take a look at this article!</p>
<p>In this blog post, we’ll discuss the steps you need to take after you’ve implemented this roadmap. The steps in the roadmap describe how you can track &amp; tag data citation yourself. Here we describe how Crossref can help you make these available to the rest of the community.</p>
<h2 id="the-what">The &lsquo;what&rsquo;</h2>
<p>Here’s the recap! From the Crossref perspective, there are two ways to add data citation links into the metadata that you register:</p>
<h3 id="1-metadata-deposits-using-the-references-section-of-the-schema">1. Metadata deposits using the references section of the schema</h3>
<p>This is where ‘citations’ are normally recorded. Publishers include the data citation into the deposit of bibliographic references for each publication.</p>
<p>Publishers can deposit the full data or software citation as a unstructured reference. For guidance here, we recommend that authors cite the dataset or software based on community best practice (<a href="https://www.force11.org/group/joint-declaration-data-citation-principles-final">Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles</a>, <a href="https://www.force11.org/node/4771">FORCE11 citation placement</a>, <a href="https://www.force11.org/software-citation-principles">FORCE11 Software Citation Principles</a>).</p>
<pre><code>&lt;citation key=&quot;ref=3&quot;&gt;
&lt;unstructured_citation&gt;Morinha F, Dávila JA, Estela B, Cabral JA, Frías Ó, González JL, Travassos P, Carvalho D, Milá B, Blanco G (2017) Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity. Dryad Digital Repository. http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5061/dryad.684v0&lt;/unstructured_citation\&gt;
&lt;/citation&gt;
&lt;/citation_list&gt;
</code></pre>
<p>Or they can employ any number of <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215578403-Adding-references-to-your-metadata-record">reference tags</a> currently accepted by Crossref.</p>
<pre><code>&lt;citation key=&quot;ref2&quot;&gt;
&lt;doi&gt;10.5061/dryad.684v0&lt;/doi&gt;
&lt;cYear&gt;2017&lt;/cYear&gt;
&lt;author&gt;Morinha F, Dávila JA, Estela B, Cabral JA, Frías Ó, González JL, Travassos P, Carvalho D, Milá B, Blanco G&lt;/author&gt;
&lt;/citation&gt;
</code></pre>
<p>We are exploring <a href="http://jats4r.org/data-citations">JATS4R recommendations</a> to expand the current collection and better support these citations - more on this soon. We also encourage additional suggestions from the community.</p>
<h3 id="2-metadata-deposits-using-the-relations-section-of-the-schema">2. Metadata deposits using the relations section of the schema</h3>
<p>This is where other relationships can be recorded. Publishers assert the data link in the <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426-Relationships-between-DOIs-and-other-objects">relationship section</a> of the metadata deposit. Here, publishers can identify data which are direct outputs of the research results if this is known. This level of specificity is optional, but we’d recommend it as it can support scientific validation and research funding management.</p>
<p>Data and software citations via relation type enables precise tagging of the dataset and its specific relationship to the research results published. To tag the data &amp; software citation in the metadata deposit, we ask for the description of the dataset &amp; software (optional), dataset &amp; software identifier and identifier type (DOI, PMID, PMCID, PURL, ARK, Handle, UUID, ECLI, and URI), and <a href="http://0-data.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/reports/help/schema_doc/4.3.5/NO_NAMESPACE.html#inter_work_relation_relationship-type">relationship type</a>.</p>
<pre><code>&lt;program xmlns=&quot;http://0-www.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/relations.xsd&quot;&gt;
&lt;related_item&gt;
&lt;description&gt;Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity&lt;/description&gt;
&lt;inter_work_relation relationship-type=&quot;references&quot; identifier-type=&quot;doi&quot;&gt;10.5061/dryad.684v0&lt;/inter_work_relation&gt;
&lt;/related_item&gt;
&lt;/program&gt;
&lt;/doi_relations&gt;
</code></pre>
<p><br></p>
<blockquote>
<p>In general, use the relation type <code>references</code> for data and software resources.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Publishers who wish to specify that the data or software resource was generated as part of the research results can use the <code>isSupplementedBy</code> relation type.</p>
<h2 id="the-how">The &lsquo;how&rsquo;</h2>
<h3 id="i-create-my-own-xml-and-register-it-with-crossref">I create my own XML and register it with Crossref</h3>
<p>Add links to datasets into your reference lists, including their DOIs if available as shown above and deposit them with Crossref. We’ll do the rest. If you want to add references to existing metadata records, you don’t need to redeposit the full article metadata, you can send us a <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215578403">resource-only deposit</a> that just contains the reference metadata to append that to the existing metadata for the article. You can also use this method if you prefer to deposit references in a separate workflow to registering your content (we know some members prefer to work this way).</p>
<h3 id="i-ve-started-using-metadata-manager-for-journal-article-deposits">I’ve started using Metadata Manager for journal article deposits</h3>
<div style="text-align:center;margin:10px">
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dc.png"
alt="Article&lt;-&gt;Data relationships in Crossref" width="350"/> <figcaption>
<p>Article&lt;-&gt;Data relationships in Crossref</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p>You can deposit data citations using either method using our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/metadata-manager/">Metadata Manager</a> tool. When entering journal article metadata, you can use the ‘Related Items’ section to enter the DOI (or other identifier) for the dataset, the type of identifier, a description of the relation type e.g. &lsquo;Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity’, and the relation type - ‘references’ or ‘is supplemented by’ depending on the relationship between the data and the article as described above. When you make the deposit, this relationship information will be registered in Crossref along with the rest of the article metadata.</p>
<p>Metadata Manager also has a section where you can enter and match your references, and then deposit these with Crossref. If you choose this method, enter any data citations into the references section before depositing the article metadata with Crossref.</p>
<p>If you want to add this information to deposits you have already made using Metadata Manager, you can search for the journals and articles in the interface, bring up the existing metadata and add in the additional information before redepositing.</p>
<h3 id="i-use-simple-text-query-to-search-for-and-deposit-references">I use &ldquo;simple text query&rdquo; to search for and deposit references</h3>
<p>Make sure you include any citations to data in the references you add into Simple Text Query. When you use simple text query to deposit these references, they will then be added into the article metadata in the Crossref database.</p>
<p>If you use OJS, they’re working on functionality (due for release soon) that will make it easier to deposit reference metadata with Crossref, so you can include citations to data in that.</p>
<p>All of this metadata&mdash;registered with Crossref&mdash;make it possible to build up pictures of data citations, linking, and relationships. Whether the citations come from the authors in the reference list or they are extracted by the publisher and then deposited, Crossref collects them across publishers. We then make the aggregate set freely available via <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery">Crossref’s APIs</a> in multiple interfaces (REST, OAI-­PMH, OpenURL) and formats (XML and JSON). DataCite does the same for data repositories and so this provides an easy way for publishers and data repositories to exchange information about data citations. As mentioned previously, this all feeds in Event Data. Data is made openly available to a wide host of parties across the extended research ecosystem including funders, research organisations, technology and service providers, indexers, research data frameworks such as <a href="http://www.scholix.org/">Scholix</a>, etc.</p>
<p>Do you have questions about how to add these links to your Crossref or DataCite metadata? We’ll be running a series of webinars in early 2019 to give you a chance to join us live and ask any questions you have. Eager to get started in the meantime? <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">Let us know</a> and we’ll start to coordinate.</p>Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a matchhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match/
Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000Dominika Tkaczykhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match/<p>Matching (or resolving) bibliographic references to target records in the collection is a crucial algorithm in the Crossref ecosystem. Automatic reference matching lets us discover citation relations in large document collections, calculate citation counts, H-indexes, impact factors, etc. At Crossref, we currently use a matching approach based on reference string parsing. Some time ago we realized there is <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/labs/resolving-citations-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-parser/">a much simpler approach</a>. And now it is finally battle time: which of the two approaches is better?</p>
<h3 id="tl-dr">TL;DR</h3>
<ul>
<li>I evaluated and compared four approaches to reference matching: the legacy approach based on reference parsing, and three variants of the new idea called <strong>search-based matching</strong>.</li>
<li>A large <strong>automatically generated dataset</strong> was used for the experiments. It is composed of 7,374 metadata records from the Crossref collection, each of which was formatted automatically into reference strings using 11 citation styles.</li>
<li>The main metrics used for the evaluation are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall">precision and recall</a>. I also use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score">F1</a> as a standard metric that combines precision and recall into a single number, weighing them equally. All values are calculated for each metadata record separately and averaged over the dataset.</li>
<li>In general, search-based matching is better than the legacy approach in F1 and recall, but worse in precision.</li>
<li>The best variant of <strong>search-based matching outperforms the legacy approach in average F1 (84.5% vs. 52.9%)</strong>, with the average precision worse by only 0.1% (99.2% vs 99.3%), and the average recall better by 88% (79.0% vs. 42.0%).</li>
<li>The best variant of search-based matching also outperforms the legacy approach in average F1 for each one of the 11 styles.</li>
<li>A weak spot of the parsing-based approach is degraded/noisy reference strings, which do not appear to use any of the known citation styles.</li>
<li>A weak spot of search-based approach is short reference strings, and in particular citation styles that do not include the title in the reference string.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="introduction">Introduction</h3>
<p>In reference matching, on the input we have a bibliographic reference. It can have the form of an unstructured string, such as:</p>
<p><em>(1) Adamo, S. H.; Cain, M. S.; Mitroff, S. R. Psychological Science 2013, 24, 2569–2574.</em></p>
<p>The input can also have the form of a structured reference, such as (BibTex format):</p>
<pre><code>@article{adamo2013,
author = {Stephen H. Adamo and Matthew S. Cain and Stephen R. Mitroff},
title = {Self-Induced Attentional Blink: A Cause of Errors in Multiple-Target Search},
journal = {Psychological Science},
volume = {24},
number = {12},
pages = {2569-2574},
year = {2013}
}
</code></pre>
<p>The goal of matching is to find the document, which the input reference points to.</p>
<h3 id="matching-algorithms">Matching algorithms</h3>
<p>Matching references is not a trivial task even for a human, not to mention the machines, which are still a bit less intelligent than us (or so they want us to believe…). A typical meta-approach to reference matching might be to score the similarity between the input reference and the candidate target documents. The document most similar to the input is then returned as the target.</p>
<p>Of course, still a lot can go wrong here. We can have more than one potential target record with the same score (which one do we choose?). We can have only documents with low to medium scores (is the actual target even present in our collection?). We can also have errors in the input string (are the similarity scores robust enough?). Life&rsquo;s tough!</p>
<p>The main difference between various matching algorithms is in fact how the similarity is calculated. For example, one idea might be to compare the records field by field (how similar is the title/author/journal in the input reference to the title/author/journal of our candidate target record?). This is roughly how the matching works currently at Crossref.</p>
<p>The main problem with this approach is that it requires a structured reference, and in practise, often all we have is a plain reference string. In such a case we need to extract the metadata fields from the reference string (this is called parsing). Parsing introduces errors, since no parser is omniscient. The errors propagate further and affect the scoring… you get the picture.</p>
<p>Luckily, as <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/labs/resolving-citations-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-parser/">we have known for some time now</a>, this is not the only approach. Instead of comparing structured objects, we could calculate the similarity between them using their unstructured textual form. This effectively eliminates the need for parsing, since the unstructured form is either already available on the input or can be easily generated from the structured form.</p>
<p>What about the similarity scores? We already know a powerful method for scoring the similarities between texts. Those are (you guessed it!) scoring algorithms used by search engines. Most of them, including <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">Crossref&rsquo;s</a>, do not need a structured representation of the object, they are perfectly happy with just a plain text query.</p>
<p>So all we need to do is to pass the original reference string (or some concatenation of the reference fields, if only a structured reference is available) to the search engine and let it score the similarity for us. It will also conveniently sort the results so that it is easy to find the top hit.</p>
<h3 id="evaluation">Evaluation</h3>
<p>So far so good. But which strategy is better? Is it better to develop an accurate parser, or just rely on the search engine? I don&rsquo;t feel like guessing. Let&rsquo;s try to answer this using (data) science. But first, we need to decompose our question into smaller pieces.</p>
<h4 id="question-1-how-can-i-measure-the-quality-of-a-reference-matcher">Question 1. How can I measure the quality of a reference matcher?</h4>
<p>Generally speaking, this can be done by checking the resulting citation links. Simply put, the better the links, the better the matching approach must have been.</p>
<p>A few standard metrics can be applied here, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision">accuracy</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall">precision, recall</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score">F1</a>. We decided to calculate precision, recall and F1 separately for each document in the dataset, and then average those numbers over the entire dataset.</p>
<p>When I say &ldquo;documents&rdquo;, I really mean &ldquo;target documents&rdquo;:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>precision</strong> for a document X tells us, what percentage of links to X in the system are correct</li>
<li><strong>recall</strong> for a document X tells us, what percentage of true links to X are present in the system</li>
<li><strong>F1</strong> is the harmonic mean of precision and recall</li>
</ul>
<p>F1 is a single-number metric combining precision and recall. In F1 precision and recall are weighted equally. It is also possible to combine precision and recall using different weights, to place more emphasis on one of those metrics.</p>
<p>We decided to look at links from the target document&rsquo;s perspective, because this is what the academic world cares about (i.e. how accurate the citation counts of academic papers are).</p>
<p>Calculating separate numbers for individual documents and averaging them within a dataset is the best way to have reliable confidence intervals (which makes the whole analysis look much smarter!).</p>
<h4 id="question-2-which-approaches-should-be-compared">Question 2. Which approaches should be compared?</h4>
<p>In total we tested four reference matching approaches.</p>
<p>The first approach, called the <strong>legacy approach</strong>, is the approach currently used in Crossref ecosystem. It uses a parser and matches the extracted metadata fields against the records in the collection.</p>
<p>The second approach is the <strong>search-based matching (SBM)</strong> with a <strong>simple threshold</strong>. It queries the search engine using the reference string and returns the top hit from the results, if its relevance score exceeds the threshold.</p>
<p>The third approach is the <strong>search-based matching (SBM)</strong> with a <strong>normalized threshold</strong>. Similarly as in the simplest SBM, in this approach we query the search engine using the reference string. In this case the first hit is returned if its normalized score (the score divided by the reference length) exceeds the threshold.</p>
<p>Finally, the fourth approach is a variation of the search based matching, called <strong>search-based matching with validation (SBMV)</strong>. In this algorithm we use additional validation procedure on top of SBM. First, SBM with a normalized threshold is applied and the search results with the scores exceeding the normalized threshold are selected as candidate target documents. Second, we calculate validation similarity between the input string and each of the candidates. This validation similarity is based on the presence of the candidate record&rsquo;s metadata fields (year, volume, issue, pages, the last name of the first author, etc.) in the input reference string, as well as the relevance score returned by the search engine. Finally, the most similar candidate is returned as the final target document, if its validation similarity exceeds the <strong>validation threshold</strong>.</p>
<p>By adding the validation stage to the search-based matching we make sure that the same bibliographic numbers (year, volume, etc.) are present in both the input reference and the returned document. We also don&rsquo;t simply take the first result, but rather use this validation similarity to choose from results scored similarly by the search engine.</p>
<p>All the thresholds are parameters which have to be set prior to the matching. The thresholds used in these experiments were chosen using a separate dataset, as the values maximizing the F1 of each algorithm.</p>
<h4 id="question-3-how-to-create-the-dataset">Question 3. How to create the dataset?</h4>
<h3 id="results">Results</h3>
<p>We could try to calculate our metrics for every single document in the system. Since we currently have <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/">over 100M of them</a>, this would take a while, and we already felt impatient&hellip;</p>
<p>A faster strategy was to use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)">sampling</a> with all the tools statistics was so generous to provide. And this is exactly what we did. We used a random sample of 2500 items from our system, which is big enough to give reliable results and, as we will see later, produces quite narrow confidence intervals.</p>
<p>Apart from the sample, we needed some input reference strings. We generated those automatically by formatting the metadata of the chosen items using various citation styles. (Similarly to what happens when you automatically format the bibliography section for your article. Or at least we hope you don&rsquo;t produce those reference strings manually…)</p>
<p>For each record in our sample, we generated 11 citation strings, using the following styles:</p>
<ul>
<li>Well known citation styles from various disciplines:
<ul>
<li>american-chemical-society (acs)</li>
<li>american-institute-of-physics (aip)</li>
<li>elsevier-without-titles (ewt)</li>
<li>apa</li>
<li>chicago-author-date</li>
<li>modern-language-association (mla)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Known styles + random noise. To simulate not-so-clean data, we randomly added noise (additional spaces, deleted spaces, typos) to the generated strings of the following styles:
<ul>
<li>american-institute-of-physics</li>
<li>apa</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Custom degraded &ldquo;styles&rdquo;:
<ul>
<li>degraded: a simple concatenation of authors&rsquo; names, title, container title, year, volume, issue and pages</li>
<li>one author: a simple concatenation of the first author&rsquo;s name, title, container title, year, volume, issue and pages</li>
<li>title scrambled: same as degraded, but with title words randomly shuffled</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>Some styles include the DOI in the reference string. In such cases we stripped the DOI from the string, to make the matching problem non-trivial.</p>
<p>An ideal matching algorithm will match every generated string to the record it was generated from. In practise, some of the expected matches will be missing, which will lower the recall of the tested matching approach. On the other hand, it is very probable that we will get the precision of 100%. To have the precision lower than 100%, we would have to have some unexpected matches to our sampled documents, which is unlikely. This is obviously not great, because we are missing a very important piece of information.</p>
<p>What can we do to “encourage” such mismatches to our sampled documents? We could generate additional reference strings of documents that are not in our sample, but are similar to the documents in our sample. Hopefully, we will see some incorrect links from those similar strings to our sampled documents.</p>
<p>For each sampled document I added up to 2 similar documents (I used, surprise surprise, our search engine to find the most similar documents). I ended up with 7,374 items in total (2,500 originally sampled and 4,874 similar items). For each item, 11 different reference strings were generated. Each reference string was then matched using the tested approaches and I could finally look at some results.</p>
<h3 id="results-1">Results</h3>
<p>First, let&rsquo;s compare the overall results averaged over the entire dataset:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/matching_comparison_overall.png" alt="overall comparison of reference matching evaluation" width="500px" /></p>
<p>The small vertical black lines at the top of the boxes show the confidence intervals at the confidence level 95%. The table gives the exact values and the same confidence intervals. The best result for each metric is bolded.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>average precision</th>
<th>average recall</th>
<th>average F1</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>legacy approach</td>
<td><strong>0.9933</strong><br />(0.9910 - 0.9956)</td>
<td>0.4203<br />(0.4095 - 0.4312)</td>
<td>0.5289<br /> (0.5164 - 0.5413)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SBM (simple threshold)</td>
<td>0.9890<br />(0.9863 - 0.9917)</td>
<td>0.7127<br />(0.7021 - 0.7233)</td>
<td>0.7866<br />(0.7763 - 0.7968)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SBM (normalized threshold)</td>
<td>0.9872<br />(0.9844 - 0.9901)</td>
<td><strong>0.7905</strong><br />(0.7796 - 0.8015)</td>
<td>0.8354<br />(0.8249 - 0.8458)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SBMV</td>
<td>0.9923<br />(0.9902 - 0.9945)</td>
<td>0.7902<br />(0.7802 - 0.8002)</td>
<td><strong>0.8448</strong><br />(0.8352 - 0.8544)</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>The confidence intervals given in the table are the ranges, in which it is 95% likely to have the real average precision, recall and F1. For example, we are 95% sure that the real F1 for SBMV in our entire collection is within the range 0.8352 - 0.8544.</p>
<p>As we can see, each metric has a different winner.</p>
<p><strong>The legacy approach is the best in precision</strong>. This suggests the legacy approach is quite conservative and outputs a match only if it is very sure about it. This might also result in missing a number of true matches (false negatives).</p>
<p>According to the paired Student&rsquo;s t-test, the difference between the average precision of the legacy approach and the average precision of the second best SBMV is not statistically significant. This means we cannot rule out that this difference is simply the effect of the randomness in sampling, and not the sign of the true difference.</p>
<p><strong>SBM with a normalized threshold is the best in recall</strong>. This suggests that it is fairly tolerant and returns a lot of matches, which might also result in returning more incorrect matches (false positives). Also in this case the difference between the winner and the second best (SBMV) is not statistically significant.</p>
<p><strong>SBMV is the best in F1</strong>. This shows that this approach balances precision and recall the best, despite being only the second best in both of those metrics. According to the paired Student&rsquo;s t-test, the difference between SBMV and the second best approach (SBM with a normalized threshold) is <strong>statistically significant</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>All variants of the search-based matching outperform the parsing-based approach in terms of F1</strong>, with statistically significant differences. This shows that in search based-matching it is possible to keep precision almost as good as in the legacy approach, and still include many more true positives.</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s also look at the same results split by the citation style:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/matching_comparison_by_style.png" alt="comparison of reference matching evaluation by style" width="500px" /></p>
<p>For all styles the precision values are very high, and the legacy approach is slightly better than all variations of the search-based approach.</p>
<p>In terms of recall and F1 SBM with a simple threshold is better than the legacy approach in 8 out of 11 styles. The three styles for which the legacy approach outperforms SBM with a simple threshold are styles that do not include the title in the reference strings (acs, aip and ewt). The reason for this is that the simple threshold cannot be well calibrated for shorter and longer reference strings at the same time.</p>
<p>SBM with a normalized threshold and <strong>SBMV is better than the legacy approach in recall and F1 for all 11 styles</strong>.</p>
<p>The weak spot of the legacy approach is degraded and noisy reference strings, which do not appear to use any of the known citation styles.</p>
<p>The weak spot of the search-based matching is short reference strings, and in particular citation styles that do not include the title in the string.</p>
<h3 id="limitations">Limitations</h3>
<p>The limitations are related mostly to the method of building the dataset.</p>
<ul>
<li>All the numbers reported here are estimates, since they were calculated on a sample.</li>
<li>The numbers show strengths and weaknesses of each approach, but they do not reflect the real precision and recall in the system:
<ul>
<li>Since we included only 2 similar documents for each document in the sample, precision is most likely lower in the real data.</li>
<li>We used a number of styles distributed uniformly. Of course in the real system the styles and their distribution might be different, which affects all the calculated numbers.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>What does the sample say?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-does-the-sample-say/
Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000Dominika Tkaczykhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-does-the-sample-say/<p>At Crossref Labs, we often come across interesting research questions and try to answer them by analyzing our data. Depending on the nature of the experiment, processing <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/">over 100M records</a> might be time-consuming or even impossible. In those dark moments we turn to sampling and statistical tools. But what can we infer from only a sample of the data?</p>
<p>Imagine you are cooking soup. You just put some salt in it and now you are wondering if it is salty enough. What do you do next?</p>
<ul>
<li>Option #1: Since you carefully measured 1/7 of a teaspoon of salt per 0.13 litres of soup (as always), you already know the soup is fine. Everyone else better stop asking silly questions and eat their soup.</li>
<li>Option #2: You stir everything carefully and taste a tablespoon. If it is not salty enough, you put more salt in the soup and repeat the tasting procedure.</li>
<li>Option #3: You eat a tablespoon of soup and it tastes fine. But wait, there&rsquo;s more soup in the pot, what if the sip you&rsquo;ve just tasted was somehow different than the rest? You decide it&rsquo;s better to eat another spoon of soup (which tastes fine). Still, a lot of soup left, who knows what that tastes like? It might be safer to eat an entire bowl of soup. Hmm, still not sure, you&rsquo;ve eaten such a small fraction of the soup, who can guarantee the rest tastes the same? You have no choice but to eat another bowl, and then some more… Ooops, now you have eaten the entire pot of soup! At least you can be 100% sure now that the soup was indeed salty enough. The problem is, there is no soup left, and also, you don&rsquo;t feel so good. But people are getting hungry, so you start cooking a new batch…</li>
</ul>
<p>If your answer was option #3, read on. Your life is going to get easier!</p>
<h3 id="tl-dr">TL;DR</h3>
<ul>
<li>Sampling and confidence intervals can be used to estimate the mean of a certain feature, or the proportion of items passing a certain test, by calculating it only for a random sample of items, instead of the entire large set of items. Note that estimating =/= guessing.</li>
<li>Confidence intervals are a way of controlling the amount of uncertainty related to randomness in sampling.</li>
<li>The confidence interval has a form (estimated value - something, estimated value + something). Confidence interval at the confidence level 95% is interpreted as follows: we are 95% sure that the real value that we are estimating is within our calculated confidence interval.</li>
<li>The higher the confidence level (i.e. the more certain we want to be about the interval), the wider the interval has to be.</li>
<li>The larger the sample, the narrower the confidence interval.</li>
<li>We are never 100% sure that the value we are estimating is actually within our calculated confidence interval. By setting the confidence level high, we only make sure this is a very likely event.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="the-problem">The problem</h3>
<p>Sampling and estimating drew my attention while I was working on the evaluation of the reference matching algorithms. In Crossref&rsquo;s case, reference matching is the task of finding the target document DOI for the given input reference string, such as:</p>
<p><em>(1) Adamo, S. H.; Cain, M. S.; Mitroff, S. R. Psychological Science 2013, 24, 2569–2574.</em></p>
<p>Accurate reference matching is very important for the scientific community. Thanks to automatic reference matching we are able to find citing relations in large document sets, calculate citation counts, H-indexes, impact factors, etc.</p>
<p>For several weeks now I have been investigating <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/labs/resolving-citations-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-parser/">a simple reference matching algorithm based on the search engine</a>. In this algorithm, we use the input reference string as the query in the search engine, and we return the first item from the results as the target document. Luckily, at Crossref we already have <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">a good search engine</a> in place, so all the pieces are there.</p>
<p>I was interested in how well this simple algorithm works, i.e. how often the correct target document is found. For example, let&rsquo;s say we have a reference string in APA citation style generated for a specific record in Crossref system. How certain can I be that it will be correctly matched to the record&rsquo;s DOI?</p>
<p>I could calculate this directly by generating the APA reference string for every record in the system and trying to match those strings to DOIs. Since we already have <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/">over 100M records</a>, this would take a while and I was getting impatient. So instead of eating the whole pot of soup, I decided to stir and taste just a little bit of it, or, academically speaking, use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)">sampling</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval">confidence intervals</a>.</p>
<p>These statistical tools are useful in situations, where we have a large set of items, and we want to know the average of a certain feature of an item in our set, or the proportion of items passing a certain test, but calculating it directly is impossible or difficult. For example, we might want to know the average height of all women living in USA, the average salary of a Java programmer in London, or the proportion of book records in the Crossref collection. The entire set we are interested in is called a <strong>population</strong> and the value we are interested in is called a <strong>population average</strong> or a <strong>population proportion</strong>. Sampling and confidence intervals let us estimate the population average or proportion using only a sample of items, in a reliable and controlled way.</p>
<h3 id="experiments">Experiments</h3>
<p>In general I wanted to see, how well I can estimate the population proportion of records passing a certain test, using only a sample.</p>
<p>In the following experiments, the population is 1 million metadata records from the Crossref collection. I didn&rsquo;t use the entire collection as the population, because I wanted to be able to calculate the real proportion and compare it to the estimates.</p>
<p>The test for a single record is: whether the APA reference string generated from said record is correctly matched to the record&rsquo;s original DOI. In other words: if I generate the APA reference string from my record and use it as the query in Crossref&rsquo;s search, will the record be the first element in the result list? Note that this proportion can also be interpreted as the probability that the APA reference string will be correctly matched to the target DOI.</p>
<h4 id="estimating-from-a-sample">Estimating from a sample</h4>
<p>I took a random sample of size 100 from my population and calculated the proportion of the records correctly matched - this is called a <strong>sample proportion</strong>. In my case, the sample proportion is 0.92. This means that in my sample 92 reference strings were successfully matched to the right DOIs. Not too bad.</p>
<p>I could now treat this number as the estimate and assume that 0.92 is close to the population proportion. On the other hand, this is only a sample, and a rather small one, which raises doubts. What if our 92 correct matches happen to be the only correct matches in the entire 1M population? In such a case, our estimate of 0.92 would be very far from the population proportion. This uncertainty related to sampling randomness can be captured by the confidence interval.</p>
<h4 id="confidence-interval">Confidence interval</h4>
<p>The confidence interval for my 100-point sample, at the confidence level 95%, is 0.8668-0.9732. This is interpreted as follows: we are 95% sure that the real population proportion is within the range 0.8668-0.9732. Note that the sample average (0.92) is exactly in the middle of this range.</p>
<p>100 items is not a big sample. Let&rsquo;s calculate the confidence interval for a sample 10 times larger. From a sample of size 1000 I got the estimate 0.932, and the confidence interval 0.9164-0.9476. Based on this, we can be 95% sure that the real population proportion is within the range 0.9164-0.9476.</p>
<p>It seems the our interval got smaller when we increased the sample size. Let&rsquo;s plot the intervals for a variety of sample sizes:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_ci_by_size.png" alt="confidence interval vs sample size" width="500px" /></p>
<p>The blue line represents the estimated proportion for samples of different sizes, and the grey vertical lines are confidence intervals. The estimated proportion varies, because for each size a different sample was drawn.</p>
<p>We can see that increasing the sample size decreases the interval. This should make intuitive sense: if we have more data to estimate from, we can expect our estimate to be more reliable (i.e. closer to the population proportion).</p>
<p>What about the confidence level? By setting the confidence level we specify, how certain we want to be about our confidence interval. So far I used 95%. What happens if I calculate the confidence intervals for my original sample of 100 records, but with varying confidence level?</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_ci_by_cl.png" alt="confidence interval vs confidence level" width="500px" /></p>
<p>In this case the average is always the same, because only one sample was used.</p>
<p>As we can see, increasing the confidence level widens the interval. In other words, the more certain we want to be about the interval containing the real population average, the wider the interval has to be.</p>
<h4 id="sampling-distribution">Sampling distribution</h4>
<p>So far so good, but where does this magic confidence interval actually come from? It is calculated by the theoretical analysis of the sampling distribution (not to be confused with sample distribution):</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Sample distribution</strong> is when we collect one sample of size <em>k</em> and calculate a certain feature for every element in the sample. It is a distribution of <em>k</em> values of the feature in one sample.</li>
<li><strong>Sampling distribution</strong> is when we independently collect <em>n</em> samples, each of size <em>k</em>, and calculate the sample proportion for each sample. It is the distribution of <em>n</em> sample proportions.</li>
</ul>
<p>Imagine I collect all samples of size 100 from my population and I calculate the sample proportion for each sample. This is the sampling distribution. Now I randomly choose one number from this sampling distribution. Note that this is equivalent to what I did before: choosing one random sample of size 100 and calculating its sample proportion.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem">Central Limit Theorem</a>, sampling distribution is approximately normal with the mean equal to the population proportion. Here is the visualisation of the sampling distribution:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_sampling_distribution.png" alt="visualization of sampling distribution" width="500px" /></p>
<p>The black vertical line shows the mean of the sampling distribution. This is also the real population proportion. The grey area covers the middle 95% of the distribution mass (within 2 standard deviations from the mean).</p>
<p>When we choose one sample and calculate the sample proportion, there are two possibilities:</p>
<ul>
<li>With 95% probability, we were lucky and the sample proportion is within the grey area. In that case, the real population proportion is not further than 2 standard deviations from our estimate.</li>
<li>With 5% probability, we were unlucky and the sample proportion is outside the grey area. In that case, the real population proportion is further than 2 standard deviations from our estimate.</li>
</ul>
<p>So with the confidence of 95% we can say that the real population proportion is within 2 standard deviations from our sample proportion. We can see now that these 2 standard deviations of the sampling distribution define our confidence interval at the confidence level of 95%.</p>
<p>Smaller confidence level would make the grey area narrower, and the confidence interval would shrink as well. Larger confidence level makes the grey area, and the confidence interval, larger.</p>
<p>To look more closely at the sampling distribution, I generated sampling distributions for all combinations of &ldquo;<em>n</em> samples of size <em>k</em>&rdquo;, where <em>n</em> and <em>k</em> are the elements of the set {25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200}. This is only an approximation, since the real sampling distributions would contain many more samples.</p>
<p>Here is the heatmap showing the mean of each sampling distribution (this should be approximately the same as the real population proportion):</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_sampling_means.png" alt="means of sampling distributions" width="500px" /></p>
<p>We can see that there is some variability in the top left part of the heatmap, which corresponds to small sample sizes and small numbers of samples. The bottom right part of the heatmap shows much less variability. As we increase the sample size and number of samples, the mean of the sampling distribution approaches numbers around 0.933.</p>
<p>Here is the heatmap showing the standard deviation for each sampling distribution:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_sampling_stdevs.png" alt="standard deviations of sampling distributions" width="500px" /></p>
<p>We can clearly see how the standard deviation decreases when we increase the sample size. This is consistent with the previous observation, that the confidence interval decreases when the sample size is increased.</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s also see the histograms of all the sampling distributions:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_sampling_histograms.png" alt="histograms of sampling distributions" width="500px" /></p>
<p>Here we can see the following patterns:</p>
<ul>
<li>All histograms indeed seem to be centered around approximately the same number.</li>
<li>The more samples we include, the more normal the sampling distribution appears. This happens because with more samples the real sampling distribution is better approximated.</li>
<li>The larger the sample size, the narrower the sampling distribution (i.e. smaller standard deviation).</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="the-estimation-vs-the-real-value">The estimation vs. the real value</h4>
<p>Let&rsquo;s go back to my original question. What is the proportion of reference strings in APA style, that are successfully matched to the original DOIs of the records they were generated from? So far we observed the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>A small sample of 100 gave the estimate 0.92 (confidence interval 0.8668-0.9732)</li>
<li>A larger samples of 1000 gave the estimate 0.932 (confidence interval 0.9164-0.9476)</li>
<li>The means of sampling distributions seem to slowly approach 0.933</li>
</ul>
<p>So what is the real population proportion in my case? It is 0.933005. As we can see, the estimations were fairly close, and the intervals indeed contain the real value.</p>
<p>Now I can also calculate the confidence interval for each sample in my sampling distributions, and then the fraction of the intervals that contain the real population proportion (I expect these numbers to be close to the confidence level 95%). Here is the heatmap:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/sampling_sampling_fractions.png" alt="fractions of samples containing the real proportion in confidence interval" width="500px" /></p>
<p>We can see that for larger sample sizes indeed the fractions are high. The fraction is not always above 95%, as we would expect, especially for smaller sample sizes. One of the reasons is that when we calculate the confidence interval, we approximate the standard deviation of the population with the standard deviation of the sample. This is not always a reliable estimate, especially for small samples. This suggests that sample sizes of at least 1000-2000 should be used.</p>
<h3 id="be-careful">Be careful</h3>
<p>Some important things to remember:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Aggregate functions</strong>. As mentioned before, apart from estimating the proportion, a similar procedure can be applied for estimating the average of a certain numeric feature.</li>
<li><strong>(Lack of) certainty</strong>. Remember that the confidence level &lt; 1. This means that we are never sure that our confidence interval contains the true population proportion. If for any reason you need to be 100% sure, just process the entire dataset.</li>
<li><strong>Randomness</strong>, a.k.a. “stirring before tasting”. The sample has to be chosen randomly. Beware of assuming that the dataset is shuffled and taking the first 1000 rows!</li>
<li><strong>Sample size</strong>. We know already that the larger the sample, the better. As a rule of thumb, using sample sizes &lt; 30 makes the estimates, including the interval, rather unreliable.</li>
<li><strong>Skewness</strong>. In general, the more skewed the original feature distribution, the larger sample we need. In case of the proportion, the sample should contain at least 5 data points of each value of the feature (passes/doesn&rsquo;t pass the test).</li>
<li><strong>Generalization</strong>. The sample average/proportion can be used as an estimate for the population average/proportion, but only the population it was drawn from. This means that if we applied any filters before sampling (which is equivalent to sampling from a subset passing the filter), we can reason only about the filtered subset of the data.</li>
<li><strong>Reproducibility</strong>. This is more of an engineering concern. In short, all the analyses we do should be reproducible. In the context of sampling it means, at the very least, that we should record the samples we use.</li>
</ul>Why Data Citation matters to publishers and data repositorieshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/why-data-citation-matters-to-publishers-and-data-repositories/
Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000Helena Cousijnhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/why-data-citation-matters-to-publishers-and-data-repositories/<p>A couple of weeks ago we shared with you that <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citation-lets-do-this/">data citation is here</a>, and that you can start doing data citation today. But why would you want to? There are always so many priorities, why should this be at the top of the list?</p>
<p>I’m sure you heard this before—data sharing and data citation are important for scientific progress. The three key reasons for this are:</p>
<h3 id="1-transparency-and-reproducibility">1) Transparency and reproducibility</h3>
<p>Most scientific results that are shared today are just a summary of what researchers did and found. The underlying data are not available, making it difficult to verify and replicate results. If data would always be made available with publications, transparency of research would be greatly improved.</p>
<h3 id="2-reuse">2) Reuse</h3>
<p>The availability of raw data allows other researchers to reuse the data. Not just for replication purposes, but to answer new research questions.</p>
<h3 id="3-credit">3) Credit</h3>
<p>When researchers cite the data they used, this forms the basis for a data credit system. Right now researchers are not really incentivized to share their data, because nobody is looking at data metrics and measuring their impact. Data citation is a first step towards changing that.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dc.png" alt="data article nexus" width="500px" />
</div>
<p>The benefits described above are all quite long-term, so why, as a publisher or data repository, should you put your resources towards implementing data citation workflows now? During our <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/qm7p-wy23">pre-conference workshop at FORCE2018</a> we asked repositories and publishers this question. Below you’ll find some of the answers.</p>
<h3 id="data-repositories">Data repositories</h3>
<p>For data repositories, data citation leads to increased visibility of both the repository and the datasets. The workshop revealed that many repositories do a lot of work to establish links between articles and datasets, thereby significantly contributing to transparency in research. Some of the repositories explained that they hire curators that text mine articles to find associations and manually curate datasets to ensure information about links is part of the metadata. This is reflected in Event Data, where 99% of links between articles and datasets comes from data repository metadata. This downstream enrichment of metadata is useful, but it would be more effective if all stakeholders strive to establish these links at a much earlier stage in the research communication process.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-icpsr-umich-edu.libus.csd.mu.edu/icpsrweb/">ICPSR</a>, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, shared:</p>
<p>ICPSR views data citation as vital. As a large social science data archive, ICPSR curates, preserves, and distributes data for the research community to re-use over time. Data citation makes data visible to the research community. Without it, data cannot be accessed for re-use or reproduced for transparency. Its use cannot be tracked and counted to reveal its impact and potential for new uses by investigators in new fields or in combination with new types of data. Data creators cannot receive adequate credit for their intellectual output. And the original investment by funders and scientists to create those data stops producing dividends. Therefore, data citation plays an essential role in the data sharing lifecycle.</p>
<p>Proper data citation, with a unique identifier, makes it much easier to measure impact. When data use is not cited or cited obliquely, it is rendered virtually invisible. Hence, much data use is still not easily detected. The <a href="https://0-www-icpsr-umich-edu.libus.csd.mu.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/citations/">ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature</a> represents ICPSR’s efforts to identify publications that analyze data distributed at ICPSR and link them directly to the data in the ICPSR catalog. As of 2018, ICPSR has a searchable database that contains nearly 80,000 citations of published and unpublished works resulting from analyses of data held in the archive. ICPSR also makes the case for data citation in its brief new video, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiCZKV-alC0">“ICPSR 101: Why Should I Cite Data?”</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.gbif.org/">GBIF</a>, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, explained:</p>
<p>The work required to collect, clean, compile and publish biodiversity datasets is significant and deserves recognition. Researchers publish studies based on data made available through <a href="https://www.gbif.org/">GBIF.org</a> at a rate of about 2 papers every single day. It is crucial for GBIF to link these scientific uses to the underlying data as one measure of demonstrating the value and impact of sharing free and open biodiversity data. At the moment, however, only about 10 percent of authors cite or acknowledge the datasets used in research papers properly. As a result, data publishers efforts often risk going unnoticed, and the true impact of sharing data remains invisible. GBIF will continue to work with publishers and researchers to provide guidance and input for how to best cite the use of GBIF-mediated data in scientific journals to ensure proper attribution and reproducible research and to demonstrate the true value of free and open access to biodiversity data.</p>
<h3 id="publishers">Publishers</h3>
<p>By ensuring data is cited in a consistent way, publishers help provide transparency and context for the content they publish. Depositing that information as part of the Crossref metadata helps that work go further by uncovering how data is being used across multiple publications and publishers This means patterns can be explored and researchers can gain more comprehensive recognition and credit for the work they have done.</p>
<p>Melissa Harrison, Head of Production Operations at <a href="https://elifesciences.org/">eLife</a> says:</p>
<p>eLife is committed to ensuring researchers get credit for all their outputs, and data is a major component of this. We&rsquo;re working with Crossref and JATS4R to enable publishers to tag their JATS data content consistently and thus create an easy crosswalk to their Crossref deposits. The JATS4R guidance on Data Availability Statements, linked to and incorporating data citations, will be updated soon, please watch that space!</p>
<p>It will be really interesting to see how much re-use of previously published data is happening, look for patterns in re-use, and see links and hopefully building up of data by different research groups. Ultimately, this will incentivize researchers and publishers to ensure it is correctly accredited at source and in publications, improving the cycle further.’</p>
<p>Anita de Waard, VP of Research Collaborations at <a href="https://0-www-elsevier-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/">Elsevier</a>, says:</p>
<p>One of the key recommendations of the <a href="https://www.force11.org/about/manifesto">Force11 Manifesto</a> was to “<a href="https://www.force11.org/about/manifesto%20/l%20x1-200003.3">3.3</a> Add data, software, and workflows into the publication as first-class research objects”, which will allow greater reproducibility and rigor to experimental research, and allow the reuse of all digital artefacts in the scholarly lifecycle. By following the data citation principles, we achieve two things: the author presents a richer representation of their work, and the data producer receives credit for the hard work of curating and publishing citable datasets.</p>
<p>Mendeley Data and Elsevier are active contributors to the <a href="http://www.scholix.org/">Scholix framework</a> that as a collaborative and open standard, allows the open mining of relationships between articles and datasets. We are also active participants in the new <a href="http://www.copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/">Enabling FAIR Data Project</a>, and next to <a href="https://0-www-elsevier-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/connect/elsevier-supports-top-guidelines-in-ongoing-efforts-to-ensure-research-quality-and-transparency">supporting the TOP Guidelines</a> in all domains, require all authors in the earth and space sciences to deposit their data before publication.</p>
<p>Next week at <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual/">Crossref LIVE18</a>, Patricia Cruse from DataCite will talk about Data Citations and why they matter. If you’re in Toronto next week, do not hesitate to ask her or anyone from Crossref anything you want to know about data citation!</p>Ten more days 'til Torontohttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/ten-more-days-til-toronto/
Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/ten-more-days-til-toronto/<p>Our LIVE Annual Meeting is back in North America for the first time since 2015, and with just 10 days to go, there’s a lot going on in preparation. As you’d expect with a <code>How good is your metadata?</code> theme&mdash;the two-days will be entirely devoted to the subject of metadata&mdash;because it touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and librarians do. Oh, and it&rsquo;s actually super awesome too&mdash;and occasionally fun.</p>
<p>Metadata is what is used to describe the story of research: its origin, its contributors, its attention, and its relationships with other objects. The more machines start to do what humans cannot&mdash;parse millions of files through multiple views&mdash;the more we see what connections are missing, and the more we start to understand the opportunities that better metadata could offer.</p>
<p>We love metadata so much that we&rsquo;re producing an 8-foot-high depiction of the &lsquo;perfect&rsquo; record, in both XML and JSON, for people to gape at and annotate in person. Sneak preview:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/perfect-record.png"
alt="The perfect metadata record is eight feet tall." width="500"/> <figcaption>
<p>The perfect metadata record is eight feet tall.
<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/patricia-feeney">SchemaSchemer</a></p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both days feature plenary-style talks, insights from ourselves and guests who will regale us with tales of metadata woes and wonders.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/lisa-hart-martin">Lisa</a> will be there at the end of Day 1 to update everyone on some recent and potential governance changes, and&mdash;the reason we started these gatherings&mdash;to reveal the results of our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/elections/2018-slate">2018 board election</a>, the second contested election we&rsquo;ve held, and already with twice the voters from 2017.</p>
<p>Our amazing guest speakers are too brilliant and too experienced to highlight in just one blog. But check out the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">LIVE18 schedule</a> to see what they&rsquo;ll be talking about:</p>
<div class='shortcode-row'>
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 no-first-para-highlight"><ul>
<li><strong>Patricia Cruse</strong>, DataCite</li>
<li><strong>Ravit David</strong>, University of Toronto</li>
<li><strong>Clare Dean</strong>, Metadata 2020</li>
<li><strong>Paul Dlug</strong>, American Physical Society</li>
<li><strong>Kristen Fisher Ratan</strong>, CoKo Foundation</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 no-first-para-highlight"><ul>
<li><strong>Stefanie Haustein</strong>, University of Ottawa</li>
<li><strong>Bianca Kramer</strong>, Utrecht University</li>
<li><strong>Graham Nott</strong>, Freelance developer (eLife/JATS)</li>
<li><strong>Jodi Schneider</strong>, University of Urbana-Champaign</li>
<li><strong>Shelley Stall</strong>, American Geophysical Union</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<p>We’ll be taking over the entire second floor of the Toronto Reference Library, whose three rooms will house a bunch of conversational sessions as well as some more formal talks:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><code>Rally</code> is the main room where we’ll have the plenary-style talks, a corner for <code>Unscheduled Maintenance</code> offering live support for your questions about billing or tech for <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/ryan-mcfall">Ryan</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/shayn-smulyan">Shayn</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/isaac-farley">Isaac</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jason-hanna">Jason</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/chuck-koscher">Chuck</a>, &amp; <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/mike-yalter">Mike</a>. Running down the whole left side of this room is also the <code>You-are-Crossref</code> wall where the community will showcase their work with metadata through posters - feel free to bring one along and find <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/patricia-feeney">Patricia</a> to get the sticky tack.</p></li>
<li><p>The <code>LIVE Lounge</code> is where you can eat, drink, rest, and chat and where you&rsquo;ll likely find <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/rosa-clark">Rosa</a> as she laises between the caterers, the venue, AV, and all of us. The Lounge is also where we&rsquo;ll gather for much-needed post-election refreshments at the end of Tuesday.</p></li>
<li><p><code>The Bigger Ambitions Room</code> is where a lot of the <code>Unplugged</code> sessions will take place. This room will feature three separate stations:</p>
<ul>
<li>Crossref Labs &amp; Product where you can chat with <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/geoffrey-bilder">Geoffrey</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/esha-datta">Esha</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jennifer-lin">Jennifer L</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/patrick-polischuck">Patrick</a>, and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/christine-buske">Christine</a> about your big ideas for us, and what we&rsquo;re working on already.</li>
<li>Metadata discussions and annotations of the perfect record (previewed above) with <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/patricia-feeney">Patricia</a>, together with space to ideate around metadata principles.</li>
<li>Uses and users of metadata where <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jennifer-kemp">Jennifer K</a> will help us understand just how far Crossref metadata can reach, and who and what people are doing with it.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>We cannot wait to show you what else we have planned :-)</p>
<p>For those of you not able to attend, recordings of the presentations will be made available on the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">event page</a> directly soon after.</p>
<p>Otherwise - see you there!</p>Crossref LIVE Brazil evoked vibrant Q&A sessionhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-live-brazil-evoked-vibrant-qa-session/
Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Susan Collinshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-live-brazil-evoked-vibrant-qa-session/<p>There has been a steady increase in the growth of our membership in Latin America—and in Brazil in particular—over the past few years. We currently have more than 800 Brazil-based members; some as individual members, but most are sponsored by another organization. As part of our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">LIVE Local program</a> Chuck Koscher and I traveled to meet some of these members in Goiânia and Fortaleza, where we co-hosted events with Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil)—one of our largest <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/sponsors/">sponsoring organizations</a>.</p>
<p>These events always provide a great opportunity for us to update our members on new and upcoming Crossref developments. They are also an important way for us to discover more about the varied needs of our members’ communities and learn how we can work together better.</p>
<p>The LIVE Brazil events were attended by more than two hundred members and were held at the Universidade Federal de Goiás and the Universidade de Fortaleza respectively. Chuck and I enthusiastically demonstrated two new tools from Crossref— <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/participation/">Participation Reports</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a>, we discussed our newest content types—preprints and peer review reports, and continually highlighted the importance (and the uses) of quality metadata.</p>
<p>We were joined by some fantastic guest speakers; Milton Shintaku from ABEC explained how to register content using the Crossref/OJS deposit plugin and Crossref ambassador, Edilson Damasio, spoke about Similarity Check and gave a demonstration of how to use the iThenticate interface when checking papers for originality.</p>
<p>The vibrant Q&amp;A sessions reflected the varying needs of the audience. We talked generally about the different Crossref services and went more in-depth with discussions around submitting <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426">relationship</a> metadata for peer review and preprints. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark/">Crossmark</a> and its implementation was also a hot topic, as was how to benefit from <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check/">Similarity Check</a>—and in particular how to address cases of duplication in submitted manuscripts, and the setting up of plagiarism policies for each journal. There was also a lot of discussion around OJS integrations, and we were able to share that PKP/OJS is currently in the process of enhancing the Crossref/OJS integration, including the ability for publishers to deposit references.</p>
<p>We were also pleased to see so much interest in supplementing Crossref metadata with references, Similarity Check URLs, license information, etc. To address this we’re running a webinar in Brazilian Portuguese entitled: “Registering content and adding to your Crossref metadata in Portuguese” on 26th November. You can sign up <a href="https://crossref.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MH4zf2wyR0OIOY48EglxOA">here</a> if you’d like to attend.</p>
<p>I’d like to thank Universidade Federal de Goiás and the Universidade de Fortaleza for hosting the events, providing the venues and the translation team, and of course, thanks to everyone who came!</p>
<p>A special mention of ABEC for their help in organizing and promoting the events. As a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/sponsors/">Sponsoring Organization</a>, they relieve our team of an intense amount of technical support, billing, and other administrative burdens, saving us time and expense, while offering a localized service to Brazilian publishers.</p>
<div style="margin:10px;">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/LIVE-Brazil-ABEC.png" alt=“Brazil LIVE Goiânia" height="150px" width="400px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>Crossref staff with co-hosts ABEC and representatives from UFG who helped with the event - thank you!</p>
<hr />
It’s not about the money, money, money.https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/its-not-about-the-money-money-money./
Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Amy Bosworthhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/its-not-about-the-money-money-money./
<p>But actually, sometimes it is about the money. As a not-for-profit membership organization that is obsessed with persistence, we have a duty to remain sustainable and manage our finances in a responsible way. Our annual audit is incredibly thorough, and our outside auditors and Board-based Audit committee consistently report that we’re in good shape.</p>
<p>Our Membership &amp; Fees committee regularly reviews both membership fees and Content Registration fees for a growing range of research outputs. Together with our staff, the Board regularly reviews financial projections that inform our budgeting process and approve our budget each year.</p>
<h3 id="financial-sustainability-means-the-persistence-of-our-infrastructure-and-services">Financial sustainability means the persistence of our infrastructure and services</h3>
<p>We run a tight ship here at Crossref. We have to. So it’s not ideal when we have to chase members and users for late payments, but it’s an important part of keeping the organization afloat, and keeping our dedicated service to scholarly communications running. And that’s my job at Crossref.</p>
<p>Working here for over six years now, I’ve seen a lot of development in our finance department. We strive as a team to always improve our communication with members and users to deliver the best ‘customer’ experience. To do this, we are always tweaking our processes to improve efficiency and accuracy, and <a href="mailto:billing@crossref.org">welcome all feedback</a>.</p>
<h3 id="how-the-invoice-schedule-works">How the invoice schedule works</h3>
<p>Our annual membership invoices are sent out each January, and our Content Registration invoices are generated four times a year, each quarter. All invoices are emailed to the billing contact for your organization (please be sure to update us with any contact changes!) and have a due date of net 45 days. Our invoices now have a “pay now” link in the body of the email. This offers a faster and more convenient way for you to pay, simply by clicking on the link to our payment portal. You can also view invoices as PDFs in the payment portal. An important part of our accounting process is the automated invoice reminder schedule. There are three billing reminders we send by email:</p>
<ol>
<li>The day immediately after the invoice due date;</li>
<li>21 days past the invoice due date; and</li>
<li>45 days past the invoice due date.<br /></li>
</ol>
<h3 id="we-don-t-want-to-see-you-go">We don’t want to see you go!</h3>
<p>We understand there are many factors that can make prompt payment a challenge for some people: international transfer delays or fees; funding for your publishing operations may end; change of contacts; problems receiving our emails.</p>
<p>When an account is 90 days past due, a further email notifies you that your service is at risk of suspension. If an account is then suspended for non-payment it becomes at risk of being ‘terminated’. Once an account has been terminated, you will need to contact our membership team to rejoin Crossref. Please note that we send numerous notifications/reminders before suspension or termination takes place (we don’t want to see you go!). We can always be reached at <a href="mailto:billing@crossref.or">billing@crossref.org</a> for any invoice inquiries you may have.</p>
<h3 id="tips-that-work-for-other-users">Tips that work for other users</h3>
<p>There are some things you can do to speed-up or simplify payments:</p>
<ul>
<li>Pay with a credit card, using our online payment portal. This is fast, convenient, and lower in fees</li>
<li>Always reference an invoice number on the payment to ensure that it’s applied to your account efficiently</li>
<li>Be sure to make <a href="mailto:billing@crossref.org"><code>billing@crossref.org</code></a> a ‘safe’ email address, so that you receive our invoices and reminders</li>
<li>Always keep us up-to-date with any contact changes at your organization, to ensure that we have accurate information for invoicing and other communication</li>
<li>We recommend giving us a generic email address for your accounts payable team, such as <code>accounts@publisher.com</code> so that if somebody leaves that job, invoices can still get through.</li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks for working with us! Please let me know in the comments below if you have any feedback or additional tips for your fellow Crossref community members.</p>
<hr />
Good, better, best. Never let it rest.https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/good-better-best.-never-let-it-rest./
Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Kemphttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/good-better-best.-never-let-it-rest./<p>Best practices seem to be having a moment. In the ten years since the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/books">Books Advisory Group</a> first created a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/books-best-practice/">best practice guide for books</a>, the community beyond Crossref has developed or updated at least 17 best practice resources, as <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/resources/metadata-best-practices/">collected here</a> by the <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata 2020</a> initiative. (Full disclosure: I co-chair its Best Practices group.)</p>
<p>Books have been one of the fastest growing content types at Crossref for some time, and best practices are just one of the Book Advisory Group&rsquo;s efforts. Over the past ten years, the members of the books group have updated and added to the guide, and it’s now time for it to get some visibility, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/books-best-practice/">so we have added it to our website</a> for easy reference.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/bookcontent.png" alt="bookscontent" width="75%" />
</p>
<p>These best practices are not documented for the sake of it. They have real value and can help guide internal conversations to evaluate current practices, for example. They can also play a role in making or changing policies, training staff and providing instructions to authors on citation formatting.</p>
<p>Here are a few recent changes I’d like to highlight:</p>
<ul>
<li>A new section has been added that addresses books hosted on multiple platforms</li>
<li>The section on versions, (including books in multiple formats) has been expanded and clarified</li>
<li>A section on the use of DOIs in citations has been added</li>
</ul>
<p>It is neither final nor comprehensive, and never will be. Best practices by their very nature must evolve over time—and those with such a broad scope as books will inevitably lack some detail—but that’s all the more reason for the community to stay engaged. Looking ahead to future work from the group, chapter-level metadata is likely to get more attention.</p>
<p>Over the past few years the Books Advisory Group, chaired with aplomb by Emily Ayubi of the American Psychological Association (APA), has spent a lot of time on Crossref initiatives, like <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/get-started/multiple-resolution/">Multiple Resolution</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines/">DOI display changes</a> but also on broader industry topics like ORCID iDs for book authors, and the Books Citation Index.</p>
<p>As Emily’s term as chair comes to an end this year, we welcome Charles Watkinson of the University of Michigan as chair starting in 2019. The group meets next on 12 December when we will hear from <a href="https://coko.foundation/">Coko</a> about Editoria and have a discussion about developing our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/metadata-manager-members-represent/">Metadata Manager</a> content registration tool for books, and more.</p>
<p>If you want to share your thoughts on best practices or if you have other topics you’d like us to consider, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">please get in touch</a>.</p>
<hr />Metadata Manager: Members, represent!https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/metadata-manager-members-represent/
Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/metadata-manager-members-represent/<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/">Over 100 Million unique scholarly works</a> are distributed into systems across the research enterprise 24/7 via our APIs at a rate of around 633 Million queries a month. Crossref is broadcasting descriptions of these works (metadata) to all corners of the digital universe.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/broadcastmetadata.png" alt="broadcastmetadata" width="150px" />
</div>
<p>Whether you’re a publisher, institution, governmental agency, data repository, standards body, etc.: when you register and update your metadata with Crossref, you’re relaying it to the entire research enterprise. So make sure your publications are fully and accurately represented.</p>
<h2 id="metadata-manager-is-here-to-help">Metadata Manager is here to help</h2>
<p>This year, we’ve released a new tool aimed to make this easier and give you, members, full control over your metadata. Presenting: <strong><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a></strong>. It helps to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Simplify and streamline the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration">Content Registration</a> service, with a user-friendly interface</li>
<li>Give you greater flexibility and control of metadata deposits</li>
<li>Support users who are less familiar with XML</li>
<li>Boost metadata quality, encourage cleaner and more complete metadata records</li>
</ul>
<p>Metadata Manager is available to all our members and the service providers they work with, providing assistance with a wide range of metadata-related tasks:</p>
<ul>
<li>Regular content registration conducted by journal staff, editors and service providers</li>
<li>Registering corrections, retractions, or other editorial expressions of concern</li>
<li>Matching references to their DOIs and registering them with the publication</li>
<li>Adding metadata to existing records such as license and funding information, abstracts, or data citations</li>
<li>Late-arriving editorial updates/corrections after initial publication</li>
<li>Unexpected corrections to production hiccups</li>
<li>Emergency editorial changes that affect publication record</li>
<li>Accelerated registration for special pieces published outside of regular workflow</li>
<li>Securely and efficiently transfer titles to another publisher as the authorized owner</li>
</ul>
<p>Issues arise all the time in the dynamic and challenging work of scholarly communications. Metadata Manager provides a fast and easy way to meet these head-on when broadcasting new content or updating existing content. Submissions through this tool are processed immediately upon submission (i.e., no queues!).</p>
<p>This new tool empowers our members to “represent” in the exhilarating thrum of data reaching our API users. At this moment in time, it only supports journals, but our development team is currently working hard to include the remaining content types.</p>
<h2 id="features">Features</h2>
<p>Here’s a smattering of highlights from the Metadata Manager feature list:</p>
<ul>
<li>All metadata: easily adds any and all metadata, allowing publishers to add richness and depth to their records.</li>
<li>Prevents rejected submissions: it ensures you have satisfied all the basic content registration requirements and points out any input errors.</li>
<li>Expedited deposit: the content registration system processes each submission immediately, bypassing the deposit queue.</li>
<li>Historic log: easy to read archive of all previous submissions.</li>
<li>Effortless review: provides a clean, condensed view of metadata (invariably complicated and lengthy) to support human review of the content before submission.</li>
<li>Aids members to follow best practices: checks for completeness and reminds users of the full breadth of metadata available for the article, volume/issue, and the journal itself.</li>
<li>Full control over title transfers: no need to make these requests through our support channels. Complete the transfer at your convenience, directly through the system.</li>
</ul>
<p>For those of you that have looked at your own metadata contribution with the use of our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Reports (beta)</a>, you’ll find using Metadata Manager a quick and useful way to help you level-up your records.</p>
<h2 id="members-represent">Members, represent!</h2>
<p>We invite you to register and update your publications with Metadata Manager, relay the metadata fully and accurately to the entire research enterprise. Check out the comprehensive <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/help/metadata-manager/">help documentation</a> to find out how to set up your workspace and get started right away with your usual content registration login details.</p>
<p>As mentioned, we are continuing development, adding support for all remaining content types as well as enhancing existing features. The webDeposit form will remain available throughout this time. For journal publishers, give us a whirl and <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">let us know</a> if you see something missing or there’s a function that would improve your content registration experience!</p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 12 (with Europe PMC)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-12-with-europe-pmc/
Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-12-with-europe-pmc/<p>As part of our blog series highlighting <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/api-case-study">some of the tools and services that use our API</a>, we asked Michael Parkin&mdash;Data Scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute&mdash;a few questions about how Europe PMC uses our metadata where preprints are concerned.</p>
<h3 id="tell-us-a-bit-about-europe-pmc">Tell us a bit about Europe PMC</h3>
<p><a href="https://europepmc.org/">Europe PMC</a> is a knowledgebase for life science research literature and a platform for innovation based on the content, such as text mining. It contains 34.6 million abstracts and 5 million full-text articles. At Europe PMC we support the research community by developing tools for knowledge discovery, linking publications with underlying research data, and building infrastructure to support text and data mining. Our goal is to create a supportive environment around open access content and data, to maximise its reuse.</p>
<h3 id="what-problem-is-your-service-trying-to-solve">What problem is your service trying to solve?</h3>
<p>Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/preprints">the popularity of preprints</a> within life sciences literature. Preprints have been supported by Crossref since November 2016. In response to the rise in popularity, we have started indexing preprints alongside traditional journal publishing within Europe PMC. We expect this will:</p>
<ol>
<li>provide another means to access and discover this emergent form of scholarly content</li>
<li>help explore more transparently the role of preprints in the publishing ecosystem</li>
<li>support their inclusion in processes such as grant reporting and credit attribution systems</li>
</ol>
<p align="center"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/epmc1.png" alt="context" width="75%" />
</p>
<h3 id="how-do-you-use-crossref-metadata">How do you use Crossref metadata?</h3>
<p>Europe PMC operates an open citation network that uses reference lists from our full-text content, supplemented with metadata supplied by the Crossref OAI-PMH API. The number of citations we retrieve from Crossref increased significantly in 2017 thanks to the efforts of the <a href="https://i4oc.org/">Initiative for Open Citations</a> (I4OC) in improving awareness about sharing citation data.</p>
<p>Our work to ingest preprints into Europe PMC, however, represents our first use of the Crossref REST API. We make a series of queries for each preprint provider, making use of the “posted-content”, “prefix” and (optionally) “has-abstract” filters. We intend to migrate to using the REST API for the majority of retrievals of Crossref content in due course.</p>
<h3 id="what-metadata-values-do-you-make-use-of">What metadata values do you make use of?</h3>
<p>Currently we make use of the following fields:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>posted</code> as a publication date</li>
<li><code>abstract</code></li>
<li><code>DOI</code></li>
<li><code>author</code> for author given names and surnames</li>
<li><code>title</code> as the preprint title</li>
<li><code>is-preprint-of</code> to establish preprint –&gt; article links</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="how-often-do-you-extract-query-metadata">How often do you extract/query metadata?</h3>
<p>We query the REST API daily making use of the <code>from-index-date</code> filter and cursor pagination to insert new or modify existing records. This means that preprints will be available in Europe PMC within 24 hours of the metadata being sent to Crossref. We store the full REST response in MongoDB, a document-based database. Here are some examples of Crossref API queries used to preprint provider <em>PeerJ Preprints</em>:</p>
<pre><code>calling `https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=type:posted-content,has-abstract:true,from-index-date:2018-07-29,prefix:10.7287&amp;sort=updated&amp;rows=1000&amp;cursor=*`
calling `https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=type:posted-content,has-abstract:true,from-index-date:2018-07-29,prefix:10.7287&amp;sort=updated&amp;rows=1000&amp;cursor=AoN4ldf88uQCe6e1g%2FPkAj8SaHR0cDovL2R4LmRvaS5vcmcvMTAuNzI4Ny9wZWVyai5wcmVwcmludHMuMjcwNjJ2MQ%3D%3D`
Done importing PeerJ Preprints
modified: 2
inserted: 10
</code></pre>
<h3 id="what-do-you-do-with-the-metadata">What do you do with the metadata?</h3>
<p>From the database we parse out the relevant fields and pass them to our main relational database prior to indexing. This avails the preprint abstracts to all of the value-added services we offer for peer-reviewed abstracts, such as citations, grants, ORCID claiming, text mining, etc. We assign a unique persistent identifier comprising “PPR” followed by a number (1) to each preprint record.</p>
<p>This is displayed on the Europe PMC site as an abstract record, analogous to PubMed records, but with an obvious banner (2) indicating to readers the preprint designation; a tooltip provides further explanation of what a preprint is in comparison to a peer-reviewed article.</p>
<p>Once available on the Europe PMC platform, we then apply downstream processes including:</p>
<ul>
<li>providing an Unpaywall link directly to the full-text (3);</li>
<li>adding a hyperlink to the final published version (if there is one that we can detect) (4);</li>
<li>incorporating the preprint into our citation network (5);</li>
<li>adding useful links to e.g. alternative metrics, scientific comments and peer reviews, underlying research data in life science databases (6);</li>
<li>providing text mined annotations via SciLite (7);</li>
<li>including funding information (8);</li>
<li>displaying ORCID claims in the author list (9).</li>
</ul>
<p align="center"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/epmc2.png" alt="context" width="75%" />
</p>
<h3 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-europe-pmc-and-preprints">What are the future plans for Europe PMC and preprints?</h3>
<p>The inclusion of preprints within Europe PMC is of immediate benefit to researchers who want to explore the very latest research. Moreover we see this as an opportunity for both ourselves and the community to explore how preprints fit into the wider publishing ecosystem; for example to answer questions such as: How often will they be cited? How will they be linked to grant funding and other credit systems? How will they be reused?</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-you-like-our-api-to-do">What else would you like our API to do?</h3>
<p>The REST API and rich metadata model provided by Crossref around preprints are both excellent, but the population of the metadata fields by preprint providers can be limited and/or heterogeneous. The key challenge we see is in encouraging providers to populate the Crossref metadata fields more fully and in a uniform manner.</p>
<hr />
<p>Thanks to Michael.</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;d like to share how you use our Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>A wrap up of the Crossref blog series for SciELOhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-wrap-up-of-the-crossref-blog-series-for-scielo/
Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-wrap-up-of-the-crossref-blog-series-for-scielo/<p>Crossref member SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), based in Brazil, celebrated two decades of operation last week with a three-day event <a href="https://www.scielo20.org/en/">The SciELO 20 Years Conference</a>.</p>
<p>The celebration constituted an important landmark in SciELO’s evolution, and an exceptional moment for them to promote the advancement of an inclusive, global approach to scholarly communication and to the open access movement.</p>
<p>As part of the anniversary activities SciELO asked us to write a series of five blogs that would help the organizations of Brazil to better understand the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Why all articles should have a DOI</li>
<li>The critical role of the DOI</li>
<li>The basics of content types: translations, preprints, crossmark, and more</li>
<li>The basics of Crossref sponsorship, and<br /></li>
<li>How to make the most of your Crossref membership</li>
</ul>
<p>Below you’ll find an abstract of each of these blog posts as well as a link to the published posts in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and English.</p>
<p><strong>Why all articles should have a DOI</strong><br>
In today’s world, an author’s work needs a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for it to become discoverable, citable, and linkable. This unique alphanumeric string identifies the content of a research work, and remains associated with it irrespective of changes to its web location. Discover the origins of the DOI, how Crossref was founded, and why they continue to exist and persist.</p>
<p>Read the full blog in <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/blog/2018/07/17/as-razoes-porque-o-crossref-existe-e-persiste/#.W7XScBNKhQI">Brazilian Portuguese</a>, <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/es/2018/07/17/por-que-crossref-existe-y-persiste/#.W7XSYRNKhQI">Spanish</a>, or <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/en/2018/07/17/why-crossref-exists-and-persists/#.W3QO7ZNKg0o">English</a></p>
<p><strong>The critical role of the DOI</strong><br>
Find out why URL links to research articles are fragile, and how DOIs are essential in building stable, persistent links between research objects. This is achieved through the metadata that members deposit with Crossref, as part of their obligations. Learn how we can all contribute to creating a global, robust research record.</p>
<p>Read the full blog in <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/es/2018/08/02/el-papel-critico-del-doi/#.W7db8hNKhQI">Spanish</a> or <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/en/2018/08/02/the-critical-role-of-the-doi/#.W7dcARNKhQI">English</a></p>
<p><strong>The basics of content types: Preprints, Crossmark, translations, and more</strong><br>
What’s the difference between preprints and ahead of print? When should you use each; and, what are the DOI requirements? This article answers those questions and provides a basic overview of how to connect the metadata records of related content types, like translations.</p>
<p>Read the full blog in <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/blog/2018/08/22/os-fundamentos-sobre-os-tipos-de-conteudo-preprints-crossmark-traducoes-e-muito-mais/#.W7dcDhNKhQI">Brazilian Portuguese</a>, <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/es/2018/08/22/conceptos-basicos-de-los-tipos-de-contenido-preprints-crossmark-traducciones-y-mas/">Spanish</a>, or <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/en/2018/08/22/the-basics-of-content-types-preprints-crossmark-translations-and-more/#.W7dcLBNKhQI">English</a></p>
<p><strong>The basics of Crossref sponsorship</strong><br>
There are many organizations that want to register content and benefit from the services Crossref provides, but may not be able to do so alone. These organizations use sponsors. Sponsors are organizations who publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations. Nearly 650 of our 800 Brazilian members are represented by such a sponsor.</p>
<p>Read the full blog in <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/blog/2018/08/31/os-fundamentos-do-patrocinio-no-crossref/#.W7dcQRNKhQI">Brazilian Portuguese</a>, <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/es/2018/08/31/los-fundamentos-del-patrocinio-en-crossref/">Spanish</a>, or <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/en/2018/08/31/the-basics-of-sponsorship-at-crossref/#.W7dcWhNKhQI">English</a></p>
<p><strong>How to make the most of your Crossref membership</strong><br>
Since Crossref was founded in 2000, its member organizations have registered metadata and persistent identifiers (DOIs) for over 100 million content items. This information is used extensively by the research community—individuals and organizations—who need to find, cite, link and assess research outputs. As a SciELO member, the metadata you provide to Crossref when you register content is key to the discoverability of your journal content.</p>
<p>Read the full blog in <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/blog/2018/10/03/como-os-periodicos-podem-aproveitar-ao-maximo-sua-associacao-ao-crossref/#.W7dcaBNKhQK">Brazilian Portuguese</a>, <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/es/2018/10/03/como-las-revistas-pueden-aprovechar-al-maximo-la-membresia-de-crossref/#.W7XRsRNKhQI">Spanish</a>, or <a href="https://blog.scielo.org/en/2018/10/03/how-journals-can-make-the-most-of-crossref-membership/#.W7UYkGhKiUk">English</a></p>
<hr />Data citation: let’s do thishttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citation-lets-do-this/
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citation-lets-do-this/<p>Data citation is seen as one of the most important ways to establish data as a first-class scientific output. At Crossref and DataCite we are seeing growth in journal articles and other content types citing data, and datasets making the link the other way. Our organizations are committed to working together to help realize the data citation community’s ambition, so we’re embarking on a dedicated effort to get things moving.</p>
<p>Efforts regarding data citation are not a new thing. One of the first large-scale initiatives to establish data citation as a standard academic practice was the FORCE11 <a href="https://www.force11.org/datacitationprinciples">Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles</a> (JDDCP) in 2014. This declaration was endorsed by over 100 organizations in the scholarly community as well as many individuals.</p>
<p>Following this agreement on how data citation should be done, many projects followed. Within FORCE11, the <a href="https://www.force11.org/group/dcip">Data Citation Implementation Pilot</a> brought together publishers and repositories to put data citation into practice and work on the implementation of the JDDCP. Within the context of the <a href="https://www.rd-alliance.org/">Research Data Alliance</a>, a data-literature linking group started under the name of <a href="http://www.scholix.org/">Scholix</a> to establish a framework for exchanging information about the relationships between articles and datasets. The infrastructure building blocks now feed into projects such as <a href="https://makedatacount.org/">Make Data Count</a> and <a href="http://www.copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/">Enabling FAIR Data</a>.</p>
<p>Projects aside, if datasets are cited consistently and in a standard way, it will make it much easier for the research community to see links between different research outputs and work with these outputs. It also makes it much easier to count these citations, so that researchers can get credit for their data and the sharing of that data.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/data_article_nexus_short.png" alt="An exemplary image" width="500px" />
</div>
<p>The underlying work has been done to create an infrastructure that will effectively support and disseminate information on data citation. Data citation is here today!</p>
<p>Different organizations know how to handle data citations, and are starting to count these and make that information available in turn. This means that the only thing that’s needed is for people to actually cite data, and this information be captured and passed on. Some Crossref and DataCite members have already made great progress on this already (see Melissa Harrison’s <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citations-and-the-elife-story-so-far/">blog on what eLife is doing</a>).</p>
<p>The goals of all the data citation projects can only be realized if you start doing data citation, and we know you’ll have questions about it…</p>
<p>In the coming months, we’ll be posting several blogs and organizing sessions to tell you how you can start doing data citation - if you’re attending FORCE2018 you can catch our <a href="https://force2018.sched.com/event/Fs0A/contributing-and-consuming-data-metrics-to-make-your-data-count">joint workshop</a> there. So stay tuned and please <a href="mailto:rlammey@crossref.org">get in touch</a> if you can’t wait, we’d love to help you get started!</p>
100,000,000 records - thank you!https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/100000000-records-thank-you/<p>100,000,000. Yes, it’s a really big number—and you helped make it happen. We’d like to say thank you to all our members, without your commitment and contribution we would not be celebrating this significant milestone. It really is no small feat.</p>
<p>To help put this number into context; the National Museum of China has just over 1 million artifacts, the British Library has around 25 million books, Napster has 40 million tracks, and Wikidata currently contains 50 million+ items.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/100-mill-1.png" alt="context" width="75%" />
</p>
<h3 id="digging-into-the-100-million">Digging into the 100 Million</h3>
<p>Within these 100 Million registered content records there are <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration/">many different content types</a>.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/100-mill-2.png" alt="content types" width="75%" />
</p>
<p>And within these content types, more than 69 million records have full-text links, 31 million+ have license information and 3 million+ contain some kind of funding information. An overview of these and other <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/dashboard/">Crossref vital statistics</a> is available on our dashboard.</p>
<h3 id="100-million-what-does-your-contribution-look-like">100 Million—what does your contribution look like?</h3>
<p>Our recently-launched <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">participation reports</a> allow anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. It’s a valuable education tool for publishers, institutions and other service providers looking to understand the availability of the metadata they have registered with us.</p>
<p>Through an itemized dashboard Participation Reports allows you to monitor the metadata you are registering, even if this work is done by a third party or another department. You can see for yourself where your gaps are, and what you could improve upon. Next to each metadata element, there’s a short definition, letting you know more about it, and—crucially—what practical steps you can take to improve the score.</p>
<p>The dashboard provides the percentage counts across ten key metadata elements: References, Open references, ORCID iDs, Funder Registry IDs, Funding award numbers, Crossmark metadata, License URLs, Text-mining links, Similarity Check URLs, and Abstracts.</p>
<p>And not only can you see your own metadata—the dashboard enables you to view the registered metadata of all our 11,076 members.</p>
<h3 id="how-are-these-100-million-content-records-being-used">How are these 100 Million content records being used?</h3>
<p>Every service we provide is based on our metadata, and our APIs expose all of that metadata. Over the past year or so we have been collecting use cases from members that actively utilize the Metadata APIs and have turned these into a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/api-case-study">Metadata APIs blog series</a> so that we can share these stories of how our metadata is used with the wider community.</p>
<h3 id="a-big-number-even-bigger-ambitions">A big number. Even bigger ambitions.</h3>
<p>Gaps or errors in metadata are passed on to thousands of other services, which causes problems downstream and means we all suffer. So it makes sense for the metadata you deposit to be as accurate and complete as possible. The more elements there are to the metadata, the higher the chance of others finding and using the content. We aim to continually find effective ways to communicate this wider story around the importance of open infrastructure and metadata.</p>
<p>Over the years we’ve made great progress in connecting information about researchers, their affiliations, grants, and research outputs. Imagine how much more powerful this information would be if supplemented by more comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date metadata.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Sources - all data as of Sept 26, 2018</em><br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_China">National Museum of China</a> has 1,050,000 artifacts<br>
<a href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library">The British Library</a> has around 25 million books, more than any other library<br>
<a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Statistics">Wikidata</a> currently contains 50,290,632 items<br>
<a href="https://help.napster.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001406007-Napster-Subscription-Plans">NAPSTER</a> currently has 40 million tracks (Napster is known as Rhapsody in the US)</p>Join us in Toronto this November for LIVE18https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/join-us-in-toronto-this-november-for-live18/
Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/join-us-in-toronto-this-november-for-live18/<p>LIVE18, your Crossref annual meeting, is fast approaching! We’re looking forward to welcoming everyone in Toronto, November 13-14.</p>
<p>This year’s theme “How good is your metadata?” centers around the definition and benefits of metadata completeness, and each half day will cover some element of the theme:</p>
<ul>
<li>Day one, AM <em>Defining good metadata</em></li>
<li>Day one, PM <em>Improving metadata quality and completeness</em></li>
<li>Day two, AM <em>What does good metadata enable?</em></li>
<li>Day two, PM <em>Who is using our metadata and what are they doing with it?</em></li>
</ul>
<p>Both days will be packed with a mixture of plenary and interactive sessions. Speakers include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Patricia Cruse, DataCite</li>
<li>Kristen Fisher Ratan, CoKo Foundation</li>
<li>Stefanie Haustein, University of Ottawa</li>
<li>Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University</li>
<li>Shelley Stall, American Geophysical Union</li>
<li>Ravit David, University of Toronto Libraries</li>
<li>Graham Nott, Freelance developer of an eLife JATS conversion tool</li>
<li>Paul Dlug, American Physical Society</li>
</ul>
<p>A ‘meet and mingle’ drinks reception will be held directly after the election results on day one.</p>
<h2 id="about-the-theme-how-good-is-your-metadata">About the theme—how good is your metadata?</h2>
<p>The reach and usefulness of research outputs are only as good as how well they are described. Metadata is what is used to describe the story of research: its origin, its contributors, its attention, and its relationship with other objects.</p>
<p>The more machines start to do what humans cannot—parse millions of files through multiple views—the more we see what connections are missing, the more we start to understand the opportunities that better metadata can offer.</p>
<p>LIVE18 will focus this year entirely on the subject of metadata. It touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and libraries do.</p>
<h2 id="come-and-join-the-discussions">Come and join the discussions</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crossref-live18-toronto-nov-13-14-crlive18-registration-46284552342">Register to join</a> us this 13 and 14 November, at the <a href="https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/torontoreferencelibrary/">Toronto Reference Library</a>, 789 Yonge Street, Toronto, Canada—we look forward to seeing you there.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">Read more about our annual events</a></p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 11 (with MDPI/Scilit)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-11-with-mdpi/scilit/
Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-11-with-mdpi/scilit/<p>Continuing our blog series highlighting <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/api-case-study">the uses of Crossref metadata</a>, we talked to Martyn Rittman and Bastien Latard who tell us about themselves, MDPI and Scilit, and how they use Crossref metadata.</p>
<h2 id="can-you-give-us-a-brief-introduction-yourselves-and-to-mdpi-scilit">Can you give us a brief introduction yourselves, and to MDPI/Scilit</h2>
<p>Martyn is Publishing Services Manager at MDPI. He joined five years ago as an editor and has worked on editorial, production, and software projects. Prior to joining MDPI, he completed a PhD and worked as a postdoc. His research covered physical chemistry, biochemistry and instrument development.
Bastien Latard is the project leader of Scilit. He created Scilit as part of his Master’s degree in 2013. He is now completing a PhD on the subject of semantically linking research articles, using data from Scilit.</p>
<p>Scilit was developed in 2014 by open access (OA) publisher MDPI with the goal of having a backup of metadata for all OA articles. Soon, Scilit became more general and embraced all articles with a digital object identifier (DOI) from Crossref and those with a Pubmed ID (PMID). After seeing the potential of the database and how it could be used in a number of different contexts, we decided to make it public. Recently, other article types, including preprints have been integrated. Our main goal now is to provide useful services to the research and academic publishing communities.</p>
<h2 id="what-problem-is-your-service-trying-to-solve">What problem is your service trying to solve?</h2>
<p>Other indexing databases offer paid access, are highly selective, or host documents apart from research articles. We want to offer a comprehensive database, but also one that clearly identifies open access material. The last part is still a work in progress, but we have made good progress recently.</p>
<p>To make the access as direct as possible, we have recently integrated several OA aggregators that pick up or host free versions of full-text articles, including CORE, Unpaywall, and PubMed Central.</p>
<h2 id="can-you-tell-us-how-you-are-using-the-crossref-metadata-api-at-mdpi-scilit">Can you tell us how you are using the Crossref Metadata API at MDPI/Scilit?</h2>
<p>Scilit queries Crossref’s API in order to index metadata for single articles. DOIs are a key part of the system; because they are standards, we can use them to merge new sources into Scilit while avoiding duplicates. We cross-check the data from Crossref against other sources and update it as necessary. Citation data is also really appreciated and opens doors to further developments.</p>
<p>As a publisher, MDPI makes daily deposits to Crossref, to register journal articles on <a href="http://www.mdpi.com/">mdpi.com</a>, conference papers from <a href="https://sciforum.net">sciforum.net</a>, and preprints from <a href="https://www.preprints.org/">Preprints.org</a>. We also use the data collected at Scilit to find suitable reviewers and let authors know when their work has been cited.</p>
<h2 id="what-metadata-values-do-you-pull-from-the-api">What metadata values do you pull from the API?</h2>
<p>As much as we can! Scilit crawls the latest indexed articles every few hours to ensure it is as up-to-date as possible. This is the most important function of our system because it provides metadata for the very latest published articles, including a link to the publisher version. Scilit parses Crossref metadata and saves them. They are then indexed into our solr search engine for fast, real-time usage.</p>
<h2 id="have-you-built-your-own-interface-to-extract-this-data">Have you built your own interface to extract this data?</h2>
<p>We wrote our own code to get the data, but the API interface made this very straightforward. Scilit has been developed completely in-house by MDPI and the lead developer, Bastien Latard, is currently completing a PhD looking at how to make the most of the data using semantic data extraction.</p>
<h2 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-mdpi-scilit">What are the future plans for MDPI/Scilit?</h2>
<p>Scilit is and will be highly used in MDPI current and future projects. We have a few ideas about how to improve Scilit. We are, for example, implementing a scientific profile networking service, which will allow scholars to build their own (scientific) network with lots of functionalities. We think that it will be a really good place to search, comment, exchange around articles… maybe even more!</p>
<h2 id="what-else-would-you-like-to-see-the-rest-api-offer">What else would you like to see the REST API offer?</h2>
<p>Crossref is already doing a great job, especially with its integrated citation data. Maybe further analysis and mapping of data about organizations and institutions would be an improvement.</p>
<hr />
<p>Thank you Martin and Bastien. If you&rsquo;d like to share how you use the Crossref Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>Where does publisher metadata go and how is it used?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used/
Mon, 17 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000Laura J Wilkinsonhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used/<p>Earlier this week, colleagues from Crossref, ScienceOpen, and OPERAS/OpenEdition joined forces to run a webinar on “Where does publisher metadata go and how is it used?”.</p>
<p>Stephanie Dawson explained how ScienceOpen’s freely-accessible, interactive search and discovery platform works by connecting and exposing metadata from Crossref. Her case study showed that articles with additional metadata had much higher average views than those without - depositing richer metadata helps you get the best value from your DOIs!</p>
<p>Pierre Mounier of OPERAS/OpenEdition showed us how a variety of persistent identifiers (PIDs) including DOIs, ORCID iDs, and Funder Registry IDs have been used on OA book platforms to improve citations, author attribution, and tracking of funding. He described a forthcoming annotations project with Hypothes.is, and explained how Crossref metadata is being used in both usage and alternative metrics.</p>
<h2 id="five-ways-to-register-content-with-crossref">Five ways to register content with Crossref</h2>
<p>My overview of content registration outlined the five ways to register content with Crossref:</p>
<ul>
<li>Via the manual <a href="https://0-apps-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webDeposit/">web deposit form</a></li>
<li>Through Crossref’s new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/metadatamanager/">Metadata Manager</a> tool (beta)</li>
<li>With OJS’s Crossref plugin - <a href="https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/crossref-ojs-manual/en/config">more information here</a> (<a href="https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ojs_download/">see OJS downloads</a> Version 3.1.0 and above is the best option for supporting the fullest Crossref metadata)</li>
<li>With a <a href="https://0-doi-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">manual XML upload file</a></li>
<li>Or, using HTTPS to POST XML</li>
</ul>
<p>I also emphasized the importance of depositing, adding, and updating your metadata, and spoke about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Basic citation metadata: titles, author names, author affiliations, funding data, publication dates, issue numbers, page numbers, ISSNs, ISBNs&hellip;</li>
<li>Non-bibliographic metadata: reference lists, ORCID iDs, license data, clinical trial information, abstracts, relationships&hellip;</li>
<li>Crossmark: errata, retractions, updates, and more</li>
<li>How important it is to have accurate, clean, and complete metadata</li>
<li>The importance of registering your backfiles</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="how-to-see-the-metadata-you-have">How to see the metadata you have</h2>
<p>Anna Tolwinksa, Crossref’s Member Experience Manager, gave us an overview of the new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Reports</a> tool. She explained how Participation Reports allows anyone to see the metadata Crossref members have registered with us, and how you can see for yourself where the gaps in your metadata are, and—importantly—how you can improve your coverage.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-learnt">What we learnt</h2>
<ul>
<li>There are <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/participation/">10 key metadata elements or checks</a> in Participation Reports that aid in Crossref members’ content discoverability, reproducibility and research integrity:
<ul>
<li>References</li>
<li>Open References (check on whether they are available for all Crossref APIs and services and the public)</li>
<li>ORCID iDs</li>
<li>Funder Registry IDs</li>
<li>Funding award numbers</li>
<li>Text mining URLs</li>
<li>License URLs</li>
<li>Similarity Check URLs</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Every day, research organizations around the world rely on metadata from Crossref, and use it in a variety of systems. Here are <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/api-case-study/">a few examples</a>. Many organizations that enable research depend on Crossref’s metadata; we received over 650 million queries just last month</li>
<li>Crossref members should check Participation Reports to see what percentage of their content includes rich metadata
If the percentages are low, Crossref is happy to work with you to help understand and improve your coverage</li>
<li>Richer metadata helps research to be found, cited, linked to, assessed, and reused</li>
<li>To make sure your work can be found!</li>
</ul>
<p>Catch up with the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJhDHWhFFAs&amp;feature=youtu.be">webinar recording</a>, and slides from <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-laura-wilkinson-where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used-110918/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-laura-wilkinson-where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used-110918">Laura</a>, <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-stephanie-dawson-sciencopen-metadata-091118/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-stephanie-dawson-sciencopen-metadata-091118">Stephanie</a>, <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-pierre-mounier-where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used-91118/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-pierre-mounier-where-does-publisher-metadata-go-and-how-is-it-used-91118">Pierre</a>, and <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-anna-tolwinska-crossref-participation-reports-metadata-091118/CrossRef/crossref-webinar-anna-tolwinska-crossref-participation-reports-metadata-091118">Anna’s</a> presentations, and please <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">contact us</a> if you have any questions.</p>
<hr />Event Data is production readyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-is-production-ready/
Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Buskehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-is-production-ready/<p>We’ve been working on <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data">Event Data</a> for some time now, and in the spirit of openness, much of that story has already been <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/event-data">shared</a> with the community. In fact, when I recently joined as Crossref’s <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/hello-meet-event-data-version-1-and-new-product-manager">Product Manager for Event Data</a>, I jumped onto an already fast moving train—headed for a bright horizon.</p>
<p>What’s on the horizon? Well, the reality is you never really reach the horizon. Good product development—in my opinion—is like that train. You keep aiming for the horizon and passing all the stations (milestones) along the way, but the horizon keeps moving as you add features, improve the service, and maybe even review where you are headed. However, for Event Data we are pleased to say we have now arrived at a rather important station.</p>
<h3 id="technical-readiness">Technical readiness</h3>
<p>Thank you to all the beta testers who have journeyed with us this far—we’ve listened and learned, refined and rebuilt with the help of your feedback. We are now thrilled to say that we are service production ready. We’ve reached the station called ‘technical readiness’, and are eager to see more users board our train!</p>
<p>During this time of building and refining, Event Data has grown to include at least 66,7 million events from sources like (in order of magnitude): Wikipedia, Cambia Lens, Twitter, Datacite, F1000, Newfeeds, Reddit links, Wordpress.com, Crossref, Reddit, Hypothesis, and Stackexchange. Wikipedia alone accounts for 50 million events (and counting).</p>
<h3 id="what-does-this-mean">What does this mean?</h3>
<p>Event Data is production ready.</p>
<p>Being production ready means we are not going to make any breaking changes to the code, and we are excited to see more people <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/">jump on board</a> to explore where you can go with Event Data, and what product or service you might want to build with it.</p>
<h3 id="getting-started">Getting started</h3>
<p>Having a look at Event Data, and using it, is easy. While the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/">user guide</a> outlines everything you need to know to get fully engrossed, you can get your feet wet with a few sample queries:</p>
<p>Above I mentioned Event Data has about 50 million Wikipedia events, you can check if that has grown by looking at a query that lists all distinct events by source (your browser will need a <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/json?hl=en&amp;_category=extensions">JSON viewer</a> extension):</p>
<p><a href="http://0-api.eventdata.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/events/distinct?facet=source:*&amp;rows=0"><code>http://0-api.eventdata.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/events/distinct?facet=source:*&amp;rows=0</code></a></p>
<p>You can also see a <a href="http://0-live.eventdata.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/live.html">live stream of events</a> going through Event Data.</p>
<p>For all events registered for a specific content item, you simply query <code>http://0-api.eventdata.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/events?obj-id=https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/XXX</code>, where XXX is replaced with the DOI.</p>
<h3 id="what-next">What next?</h3>
<p>We are now focusing on the final stretch towards the official roll-out. Beyond this, we will continue to add sources and features and have a healthy roadmap to keep us on track. We value any feedback you have for us about your own journey with Event Data. Your feedback may help shape the direction we take in the future. Most of all, we are all excited to see what people build with it!</p>
<p>We look forward to continuing on our Event Data journey and we welcome you all aboard the train! Please <a href="mailto:eventdata@crossref.org">contact me</a> with your ideas.</p>
<hr />Crossref at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-at-the-frankfurt-book-fair-2018/
Tue, 11 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000Amanda Bartellhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-at-the-frankfurt-book-fair-2018/<h3 id="how-good-is-your-metadata-find-out-at-the-frankfurt-book-fair">How good is your metadata? Find out at the Frankfurt Book Fair&hellip;</h3>
<p>At the Frankfurt Book Fair this year (Hall 4.2, Stand M82), the Crossref team will be on hand to give you a personal tour of our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep">Participation Reports</a> tool. Or join us at The Education Stage to hear about how this new tool can help you view, evaluate and improve your metadata participation.</p>
<p><center></p>
<p><div class="blue-highlight">
<span><strong>How good is your metadata?</strong><br />
Join us Thursday 11th October at 15.30<br />
at the Education Stage in Hall 4.2 to find out</span>
</div>
</center></p>
<h3 id="lots-of-reasons-to-visit-our-stand">Lots of reasons to visit our stand</h3>
<p>We’ll be located in the same place as last year, Hall 4.2, Stand M82, and there are lots of reasons to visit us:</p>
<p>Get your metadata participation evaluated - <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/anna-tolwinska">Anna Tolwinska</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/amanda-bartell">Amanda Bartell</a> will walk you through your own Participation Report and provide guidance on how to improve your results. Discover how complete your metadata is, where the gaps are, and how other publishers compare.</p>
<p>Discuss a technical issue that’s hindering your metadata participation (or any other technical issue) with <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/isaac-farley">Isaac Farley</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/paul-davis">Paul Davis</a> from our Technical Support team.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jennifer-kemp">Jennifer Kemp</a> will also be around to answer all your metadata use and reuse questions. She’s looking forward to chatting with all kinds of service providers and toolmakers.</p>
<p>On the strategy side, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/ginny-hendricks/">Ginny Hendricks</a> will be there on Wednesday 10th if you’d like to discuss any policy stuff, new ideas, or find out what Crossref is planning next.</p>
<h3 id="ask-us-anything">Ask us anything</h3>
<p>Not just Participation Reports—you can ask us about anything. Perhaps about our newer content types such as <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/preprints-growth-rate-ten-times-higher-than-journal-articles/">preprints</a>, pending publications (i.e. DOIs on acceptance), or <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citations/">data citations</a>. Or, ask us how you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society, through <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata 2020</a></li>
<li>Check papers for originality, with our service for editorial rigour, through <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check/">Similarity Check</a></li>
<li>Discover where and how research is being discovered, through <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a></li>
<li>Reveal who is citing your published papers and how platforms can display this information, with our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/cited-by/">Cited-by service</a></li>
<li>Provide evidence of trust in published outputs, revealing updates, corrections and retractions, through our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark/">Crossmark service</a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Let us know</a> if you’d like to book in a meeting with one of us, or do just stop by the stand to say “Guten Tag”.</p>
<p>We look forward to seeing you there - bis dann!</p>Presenting PIDapalooza 2019https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/presenting-pidapalooza-2019/
Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/presenting-pidapalooza-2019/<p>PIDapalooza, the open festival of persistent identifiers is back and it’s better than ever. Mark your calendar for Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 and send us your session ideas by September 21.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s back and &ndash; with your support &ndash; it’s going to be better than ever! The third annual <a href="https://pidapalooza.org">PIDapalooza</a> open festival of persistent identifiers will take place at the <a href="https://www.griffith.ie/conference-centre">Griffith Conference Centre</a>, Dublin, Ireland on January 23-24, 2019 - and we hope you’ll <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pidapalooza-2019-registration-49295286529">join us</a> there!</p>
<p>Hosted, once again, by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, PIDapalooza will follow the same format as past events &ndash; rapid-fire, interactive, 30-60 minute sessions (presentations, discussions, debates, brainstorms, etc.) presented on three stages &ndash; plus main stage attractions, which will be announced shortly. New for this year is an unconference track, as suggested by several attendees last time.</p>
<p>In the meantime, get those creative juices flowing and send us your session PIDeas! What would you like to talk about? Hear about? Learn about? What’s important for your organization and your community and why? What’s working and what’s not? What’s needed and what’s missing? We want to hear from as many PID people as possible! Please use <a href="https://goo.gl/forms/EddXcg7TWTCy6Lgk2">this form</a> to send us your suggestions. The PIDapalooza Festival Committee will review all forms submitted by September 21, 2018 and decide on the lineup by mid-October.</p>
<p>As a reminder, the regular themes are:</p>
<ul>
<li>PID myths: Are PIDs better in our minds than in reality? PID stands for Persistent IDentifier, but what does that mean and does such a thing exist?<br></li>
<li>PIDs forever - achieving persistence: So many factors affect persistence: mission, oversight, funding, succession, redundancy, governance. Is open infrastructure for scholarly communication the key to achieving persistence?<br></li>
<li>PIDs for emerging uses: Long-term identifiers are no longer just for digital objects. We have use cases for people, organizations, vocabulary terms, and more. What additional use cases are you working on?<br></li>
<li>Legacy PIDs: There are of thousands of venerable old identifier systems that people want to continue using and bring into the modern data citation ecosystem. How can we manage this effectively?<br></li>
<li>Bridging worlds: What would make heterogeneous PID systems &lsquo;interoperate&rsquo; optimally? Would standardized metadata and APIs across PID types solve many of the problems, and if so, how would that be achieved? What about standardized link/relation types?<br></li>
<li>PIDagogy: It’s a challenge for those who provide PID services and tools to engage the wider community. How do you teach, learn, persuade, discuss, and improve adoption? What&rsquo;s it mean to build a pedagogy for PIDs?<br></li>
<li>PID stories: Which strategies worked? Which strategies failed? Tell us your horror stories! Share your victories!<br></li>
<li>Kinds of persistence: What are the frontiers of &lsquo;persistence&rsquo;? We hear lots about fraud prevention with identifiers for scientific reproducibility, but what about data papers promoting PIDs for long-term access to reliably improving objects (software, pre-prints, datasets) or live data feeds?</li>
</ul>
<p>We’ll be posting more information on the <a href="https://pidapalooza.org">PIDapalooza website</a> over the coming months, as well as keeping you updated on Twitter (@pidaplooza).</p>
<p>In the meantime, what are you waiting for!? <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pidapalooza-2019-registration-49295286529">Book your place now</a> &ndash; and we also strongly recommend that you book your accommodation early as there are other big conferences in Dublin that week.</p>
<p>PIDapalooza, Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 - it’s a date!</p>
<hr />Leaving the house - where preprints gohttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/leaving-the-house-where-preprints-go/
Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/leaving-the-house-where-preprints-go/<p>“Pre-prints” are sometimes neither Pre nor Print (c.f. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1</a>), but they do go on and get published in journals. While researchers may have different motivations for posting a preprint, such as establishing a record of priority or seeking rapid feedback, the primary motivation appears to be timely sharing of results prior to journal publication.</p>
<h3 id="so-where-in-fact-do-preprints-get-published">So where in fact do preprints get published?</h3>
<p>Although this is a simple question, we have not had an easy way to answer how this varies across disciplines, preprint repositories and journals. Until now. Crossref metadata provides not only an open and easy way to do so, but up-to-date data to get the latest results.
<!--more--></p>
<h3 id="ropensci-makin-it-sweet-easy">rOpenSci makin&rsquo; it sweet &amp; easy</h3>
<p>Crossref asks preprint repositories to update their metadata once a preprint has been published by adding the article link into its record via the “is-preprint-of” relation. As the record is processed, we make the link available going both directions, while preserving the provenance of the statement in the metadata output (&ldquo;asserted-by&rdquo;: &ldquo;subject&rdquo; or &ldquo;asserted-by&rdquo;: &ldquo;object&rdquo;). This results in bidirectional assertions in the Crossref REST API where search engines, analytics providers, indexes, etc. can get from the preprint to the article (“is-preprint-of”) as well as vice versa (“has-preprint”), making it easier to find, cite, link, and assess.</p>
<p>Using <a href="https://ropensci.org/">rOpenSci’s</a> R library for the Crossref REST API (rcrossref), we pulled all articles connected to a previous preprint (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=relation.type:has-preprint&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=relation.type:has-preprint&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0</a>) and then aggregated them based on journal via their ISSNs (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=relation.type:has-preprint&amp;facet=issn:*">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=relation.type:has-preprint&amp;facet=issn:*</a>), tallying the results in a tidy table with the journal name (ex: PLOS Biology (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/journals/2167-8359)">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/journals/2167-8359)</a>).</p>
<h3 id="the-big-reveal">The big reveal</h3>
<p>So without further delay, let’s look at the results of the 20 journals with the highest number of preprints associated with its articles (data from August 21, 2018):</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th align="left">Publisher</th>
<th align="left">Journal</th>
<th align="left">Count</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="left">PeerJ</td>
<td align="left">PeerJ</td>
<td align="left">1184</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Springer Nature</td>
<td align="left">Scientific Reports</td>
<td align="left">394</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">eLife</td>
<td align="left">eLife</td>
<td align="left">375</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">PLOS</td>
<td align="left">PLOS ONE</td>
<td align="left">338</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</td>
<td align="left">PNAS</td>
<td align="left">205</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">PLOS</td>
<td align="left">PLOS Computational Biology</td>
<td align="left">196</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Springer Nature</td>
<td align="left">Nature Communications</td>
<td align="left">187</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">PLOS</td>
<td align="left">PLOS Genetics</td>
<td align="left">169</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">The Genetics Society of America</td>
<td align="left">Genetics</td>
<td align="left">168</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Oxford University Press</td>
<td align="left">Nucleic Acids Research</td>
<td align="left">148</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Oxford University Press</td>
<td align="left">Bioinformatics</td>
<td align="left">138</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">The Genetics Society of America</td>
<td align="left">Genetics</td>
<td align="left">120</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">The Genetics Society of America</td>
<td align="left">G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics</td>
<td align="left">104</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory</td>
<td align="left">Genome Research</td>
<td align="left">104</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Oxford University Press</td>
<td align="left">Molecular Biology and Evolution</td>
<td align="left">100</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">MDPI AG</td>
<td align="left">Energies</td>
<td align="left">98</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">MDPI AG</td>
<td align="left">Sensors</td>
<td align="left">96</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Springer Nature</td>
<td align="left">BMC Genomics</td>
<td align="left">92</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">MDPI AG</td>
<td align="left">International Journal of Molecular Sciences</td>
<td align="left">86</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">JMIR Publications</td>
<td align="left">Journal of Medical Internet Research</td>
<td align="left">83</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br>
This list has not been normalized or weighted based on the size of the journal. The following observations are informed speculations, as we can only infer so much from the raw data:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>Disciplinary practice:</b> This phenomenon where preprints are a part of disciplinary practice accounts for about half of the journals represented on the list. Certain communities such as genetics and computational fields have been early adopters of preprints. As such, we see higher rates of preprint-to-article publication in journals that publish their work.</li>
<li><b>Partnerships:</b> Partnerships that facilitate submission from the preprint repository directly to a publisher or peer review service (ex: BioRxiv B2J program) make it easier for researchers to move from preprint-sharing seamlessly to submitting their journal article manuscript.</li>
<li><b>Tie-ins:</b> A quarter of the journals on the list are run by publishers with a preprint service, and have been able to tie together both arms of publishing. This removes barriers to journal article submission in the same manner as integrations between repositories and publishers, but does so as a single party.</li>
<li><b>Publisher support and treatment:</b> We also see that strong proponents and early partners of preprint repositories tend to have higher counts. Some publishers have been more outspoken in their welcome of preprints, such as PNAS (<a href="http://0-www.pnas.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/content/114/48/12630">http://0-www.pnas.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/content/114/48/12630</a>). Sometimes this support also comes in the form of special treatment. In the process of crafting editorial policy on publishing results previously posted in a preprint, some journals have carved out particular affordances in their publication workflow and content delivery streams that may contribute to the higher counts of articles. For example, Nature Research displays the preprints of submitted articles under consideration: <a href="https://0-nature--research--under--consideration-nature-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/">https://0-nature--research--under--consideration-nature-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/</a>.</li>
<li><b>Mega-journals:</b> Mega-journals such as Scientific Reports and PLOS ONE have not discouraged preprints. As such, and due to the size of their publication output, they have easily found a place among the higher counts on the list.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="taking-a-closer-look">Taking a closer look</h3>
<p>One major consideration in these results, concerns what’s missing in the data. These fall into two camps: incomplete member data, and incomplete membership coverage.</p>
<p>We have been working with our members to deposit preprints using the proper content type, and to provide links to published articles in their metadata. However, not all have yet done so (ex: SSRN), leading to holes in our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus-better-research-through-better-metadata/">research nexus graph</a>, which subsequently detracts from the completeness of the data.</p>
<p>We celebrate the preprint repositories who are required to update their metadata when an article is published from a preprint, thereby populating the map with critical bridges between preprints and articles. Crossref participation benefits not only the content owner, but the membership at large and all the systems across the research ecosystem powered by Crossref metadata.</p>
<p>Lastly, this data is dependent on the coverage of preprint repositories who register content with us. We are thrilled that <a href="https://cos.io/">Center for Open Science</a>, our <a href="https://cos.io/blog/we-are-now-registering-preprint-dois-crossref/">newest preprints addition</a> who represents 21 community repositories, has recently filled in swaths of the map. But there remain dead zones in the research graph from repositories who are not Crossref members (ex: ArXiv). Their disciplines, as a result, are under represented in these results.</p>
<h3 id="everyone-dive-in">Everyone dive in!</h3>
<p>As to the question of “where do preprints get published?”, anyone in fact can answer this question based on the metadata Crossref collects and provides to the community as an open infrastructure provider. We encourage the community to explore and analyze the data further with other available datasets to glean more insights on how scholarly communications is changing with the increasing growth of preprints. For example, the effective results across all journals represented can be weighted based on the number of articles published by each journal.</p>
<p>Crossref data is open for all to examine and reuse through our <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc">REST API</a>. Please dive in and share your findings with us!</p>2018 election slatehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2018-election-slate/
Fri, 17 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2018-election-slate/<p>With Crossref developing and extending its services for members and other constituents at a rapid pace, it’s an exciting time to be on our board. We recieved 26 expressions of interest this year, so it seems our members are also excited about what they could help us achieve.</p>
<p>From these 26, the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/committees/nominating">Nominating Committee</a> has put forward the following slate.</p>
<h2 id="the-2018-slate-seven-candidates-for-five-available-seats">The 2018 slate: seven candidates for five available seats</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>African Journals OnLine (AJOL),</strong> Susan Murray, South Africa</li>
<li><strong>American Psychological Association (APA),</strong> Jasper Simons, USA</li>
<li><strong>Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),</strong> Scott Delman, USA</li>
<li><strong>California Digital Library (CDL),</strong> Catherine Mitchell, USA</li>
<li><strong>Hindawi,</strong> Paul Peters, UK</li>
<li><strong>Sage,</strong> Richard Fidczuk, USA</li>
<li><strong>Wiley,</strong> Duncan Campbell, USA</li>
</ul>
<div class="blue-highlight">
<span><h3 id="read-the-candidates-organizational-and-personal-statements-board-and-governance-elections-2018-slate"><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/elections/2018-slate">Read the candidates’ organizational and personal statements</a></h3></span>
</div>
<p>Candidates were chosen based on the following criteria:</p>
<ul>
<li>Follow the guidance from the Board to provide a slate or seven or fewer.</li>
<li>Maintain the current balance of the board with respect to size of organizations.</li>
<li>Improve balance in other areas, with respect to gender and geography.</li>
<li>Also consider types of organizations and sector, as well as engagement with Crossref and its services.<br /></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="you-can-be-part-of-this-important-process-by-voting-in-the-election">You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election</h2>
<p>If your organization is a member of Crossref on September 14, 2018 you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 28, 2018 (affiliates, however, are not eligible to vote).</p>
<h2 id="how-can-you-vote">How can you vote?</h2>
<p>On September 28, 2018, your organization’s designated voting contact will receive an email with a link to the formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. An additional email will be sent with a username and password along with a link to our online voting platform. It is important to make sure your voting contact is up-to-date.</p>
<h2 id="want-to-add-your-voice">Want to add your voice?</h2>
<p>We are accepting independent nominations until November 7, 2018. Organizations interested in standing as an independent candidate should contact me by this date with a list of ten other Crossref members that endorse their candidacy.</p>
<p>The election itself will be held at <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">LIVE18 Toronto</a>, our annual meeting, on 13 November 2018 in Canada. We hope you’ll be there to hear the results.</p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 10 (with Kudos)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-10-with-kudos/
Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-10-with-kudos/<p>Continuing our blog series highlighting <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/api-case-study">the uses of Crossref metadata</a>, we talked to David Sommer, co-founder and Product Director at the research dissemination management service, <a href="http://www.growkudos.com/">Kudos</a>. David tells us how Kudos is collaborating with Crossref, and how they use the REST API as part of our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/plus-service">Metadata Plus</a> service.</p>
<h3 id="introducing-kudos">Introducing Kudos</h3>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/kudos-logo.png" alt=“Kudos logo" height="150px" width="250px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>At Kudos we know that effective dissemination is the starting point for impact. Kudos is a platform that allows researchers and research groups to plan, manage, measure, and report on dissemination activities to help maximize the visibility and impact of their work.</p>
<p>We launched the service in 2015 and now work with almost 100 publishers and institutions around the world, and have nearly 250,000 researchers using the platform.</p>
<p>We provide guidance to researchers on writing a plain language summary about their work so it can be found and understood by a broad range of audiences, and then we support researchers in disseminating across multiple channels and measuring which dissemination activities are most effective for them.</p>
<p>As part of this, we developed the <a href="https://blog.growkudos.com/2017/11/15/kudos-solution-illegal-sharing-copyright-content/">Sharable-PDF</a> to allow researchers to legitimately share publication profiles across a range of sites and networks, and track the impact of their work centrally. This also allows publishers to prevent copyright infringement, and reclaim lost usage from sharing of research articles on scholarly collaboration networks.</p>
<p><center><figure><a href="https://www.growkudos.com/publications/10.12688%25252Ff1000research.8013.1/reader">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/kudos-page.png"
alt="Kudos publication page" width="75%"/> </a><figcaption>
<h4>An example of a Kudos publication page showing the plain language summary</h4>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</center></p>
<h3 id="how-is-crossref-metadata-used-in-kudos">How is Crossref metadata used in Kudos?</h3>
<p>Since our launch, Crossref has been our metadata foundation. When we receive notification from our publishing partners that an article, book or book chapter has been published, we query using the Crossref REST API to retrieve the metadata for that publication. That data allows us to populate the Kudos publication page.</p>
<p>We also integrate earlier in the researcher workflow, interfacing with all of the major <a href="https://blog.growkudos.com/2018/03/28/extended-integrations-with-manuscript-submission-systems/">Manuscript Submission Systems</a> to support authors who want to build impact from the point of submission.</p>
<p>More recently, we started using the Crossref REST API to retrieve citation counts for a DOI. This enables us to include the number of times content is cited as part of the ‘basket of metrics’ we provide to our researchers. They can then understand the performance of their publications in context, and see the correlation between actions and results.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/kudos-metrics.png" alt="Kudos metrics page" width="75%" />
</p>
<p align="center">A Kudos metrics page, showing the basket of metrics and the correlation between actions and results</p>
<h3 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-kudos">What are the future plans for Kudos?</h3>
<p>We have exciting plans for the future! We are developing Kudos for Research Groups to support the planning, managing, measuring and reporting of dissemination activities for research groups, labs and departments. We are adding a range of new features and dissemination channels to support this, and to help researchers to better understand how their research is being used, and by whom.</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-kudos-like-to-see-in-crossref-metadata">What else would Kudos like to see in Crossref metadata?</h3>
<p>We have always found Crossref to be very responsive and open to new ideas, so we look forward to continuing to work together. We are keen to see an industry standard article-level subject classification system developed, and it would seem that Crossref is the natural home for this.</p>
<p>We are also continuing to monitor <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Crossref Event Data</a> which has the potential to provide a rich source of events that could be used to help demonstrate dissemination and impact.</p>
<p>Finally, we are pleased to see the work Crossref are doing to help improve the quality of the metadata and supporting publishers in auditing their data. If we could have anything we wanted, our dream would be to prevent “funny characters” in DOIs that cause us all kinds of escape character headaches!</p>
<hr />
<p>Thank you David. If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>Peer review publicationshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/peer-review-publications/
Sun, 12 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/peer-review-publications/
<h2 id="peer-review-publications-not-peer-reviewed-publications-but-peer-reviews-as-publications">Peer review publications&mdash;not peer-reviewed publications, but peer reviews as publications</h2>
<p>Our newest dedicated content type&mdash;peer review&mdash;has received a warm welcome from our members since rollout last November. We are pleased to formally integrate them into the scholarly record, giving the scholars who participated credit for their work, ensuring readers and systems dependably get from the reviews to the article (and vice versa), and making sure that links to these works persist over time.</p>
<p>Many of our members make the peer review history available to researchers in different ways. Their extra effort to post review materials alongside the article will now go further once they are registered with us and linked to the journal article. They spoke of publishing peer reviews as a standard part of their publishing operation. The scholarly contributions of their editors and referees are validated, stewarded, and published in the manner of the articles: as per general practice. To fully realize this, they are ensuring that these publications are discoverable, citable, and part of the formal scholarly record—for all the thousands of systems which draw on Crossref metadata.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Article metadata + peer review metadata = a fuller picture of the evolution of knowledge</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="the-growing-collection">The growing collection</h2>
<p>As of August 12, 2018 three publishers have registered <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/peer-review/works?facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">12446 peer reviews</a> in the dedicated content type (and schema) we rolled out last November. PeerJ (10.7287) with <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/prefixes/10.7287/works?filter=type:peer-review">12015</a> at time of writing and Stichting SciPost (10.21468) with <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/prefixes/10.21468/works?filter=type:peer-review">297 works</a>. ScienceOpen (10.14293) has registered <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/prefixes/10.14293/works?filter=type:peer-review">126 reviews</a> of papers on their post-publication platform.</p>
<p>The peer review metadata collected is partly similar, though otherwise unique to other content. In the former, general metadata that we accept for the articles, as well as the reviews, include an ORCID iD to identify the reviewer, editor, and/or author <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/peer-review/works?filter=has-orcid:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">0</a>; license <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/peer-review/works?filter=has-license:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">0</a>.
This metadata is quite distinct from the article and is important to collect, not only as a discrete publication in its own right, but also to provide richer context for the actual results shared in the associated article. They are authored by different people than the paper’s contributors (author response/rebuttal excepting). They need not have the same license.</p>
<p>Currently, none of this data has been registered. (From the publishers we’ve talked to, this is largely due to factors related to limitations in their technology systems.) And like other content types, we link up scholarly materials in the metadata and fill in the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus-better-research-through-better-metadata/">research nexus graph</a> through relations.</p>
<p>There’s no better way to understand peer review metadata than to look at real examples from our members:</p>
<ul>
<li>PeerJ review (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.2707v0.1/reviews/1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.2707v0.1/reviews/1</a>) and its metadata (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.7287/peerj.2707v0.1/reviews/1">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.7287/peerj.2707v0.1/reviews/1</a>)</li>
<li>ScienceOpen review (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14293/s2199-1006.1.sor-uncat.a5995373.v1.rhrmgu">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14293/s2199-1006.1.sor-uncat.a5995373.v1.rhrmgu</a>) and its metadata (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.14293/s2199-1006.1.sor-uncat.a5995373.v1.rhrmgu">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.14293/s2199-1006.1.sor-uncat.a5995373.v1.rhrmgu</a>)</li>
<li>SciPost review (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.21468/scipost.report.10">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.21468/scipost.report.10</a>) and its metadata (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.21468/scipost.report.10">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.21468/scipost.report.10</a>)</li>
</ul>
<p>Review-specific metadata is also critical to capturing the shape of the scholarly discussion. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Review date (required)</li>
<li>Scholarly work reviewed (required)</li>
<li>Recommendation</li>
<li>Revision stage</li>
<li>Review round</li>
<li>Contributor name</li>
</ul>
<p>PeerJ, SciPost, and ScienceOpen have registered this whole set where applicable (review round not applicable to post-publication reviews), with the exception of the recommendation.</p>
<h3 id="scholarly-contributions-captured-in-time">Scholarly contributions captured in time</h3>
<p>Published peer reviews uniquely highlight the nature of research ideas evolving over time, spotlighting the nature of this as a collective effort involving multiple individuals. The more metadata, the bolder the story. We have created a set of reference metadata (fictitious) to illustrate this phenomenon. Josiah Carberry submits a manuscript to the Journal of Psychoceramics, entitled “Dog: A Methodology for the Development of Simulated Annealing.” It undergoes two rounds of review with two referees each round. The article <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681</a> is published and registered on May 6, 2012 along with the history of peer review materials on the same day:</p>
<p>First submission</p>
<ul>
<li>Referee report 1 - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9879">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9879</a></li>
<li>Referee report 2 - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9880">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9880</a></li>
<li>Editor decision - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9881">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9881</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Revision round 1</p>
<ul>
<li>Author rebuttal - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9882">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9882</a></li>
<li>Referee report 1 - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9883">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9883</a></li>
<li>Referee report 2 - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9884">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9884</a></li>
<li>Editor decision - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9885">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345681.9885</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Published reviews can show peer feedback in progress; the progress of scholarly discussion unfolding, as expert ideas build upon each other. Many of us have traditionally located the article’s publication as the climactic event, but the story in fact doesn’t end there. Pre-publication becomes post-publication. Throughout this time, research is validated and sprouts into new ideas.</p>
<p>Peer review platform <a href="https://publons.com/home/">Publons</a> is working on getting reviews authored on its platform registered with us. Doing so will mean that PeerJ article, “Transformative optimisation of agricultural land use to meet future food demands” by Lian Pin Koh​, Thomas Koellner, and Jaboury Ghazoul <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj.188">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj.188</a> with three scholarly discussions published over the course of peer review, would also be accompanied by a fourth that occurred after publication from Gene A. Bunin (<a href="https://publons.com/publon/3374/">https://publons.com/publon/3374/</a>), not yet registered.</p>
<h3 id="research-begets-research">Research begets research</h3>
<p>In my investigation of review publications registered, two examples cropped up, highlighting the richness of the research process not only as it shows a set of research results evolve through scholarly discussion, but as it is then folded into new research outputs.</p>
<p>1) A PeerJ article “Software citation principles” <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj-cs.86">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj-cs.86</a> has had a very rich life: <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.7717/peerj-cs.86">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.7717/peerj-cs.86</a>. It was originally submitted as a preprint and underwent multiple iterations of improvement (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169</a>, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169v1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169v1</a>, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169v2">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169v2</a>, etc.). It then was subjected to peer review. And three referee reports are published alongside the final publication:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj-cs.86v0.1/reviews/1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj-cs.86v0.1/reviews/1</a></li>
<li><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj-cs.86v0.1/reviews/2">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj-cs.86v0.1/reviews/2</a></li>
<li><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj-cs.86v0.2/reviews/1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj-cs.86v0.2/reviews/1</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>We glimpse a view of time unfolding here:
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Peer-reviews-registered-PeerJ-graph1.png" alt="peer review PeerJ graph" height="325px"/></p>
NB: in the review metadata, all the dates provided reference September 19, 2016 when they were published with the accompanying research article. To really make the metadata useful, we recommend providing the date the review was received, rather than published (for publishers who are publishing pre-publication review materials).</p>
<p>The reviews were then cited in three versions of the F1000Research article, “A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review” (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.12037.1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.12037.1</a>, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.12037.2">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.12037.2</a>, and <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.12037.3">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.12037.3</a>). These three all link up on the Crossref metadata map. The visualization below is only an entrypoint into this picture of research dissemination and the spread of ideas.
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Peer-reviews-registered-PeerJ-graph2.png" alt="peer review PeerJ graph2" height="325px"/></p></p>
<p>2) András Láng served as a reviewer for a paper by Danilo Garcia​ and Fernando R. González Moraga published as “The Dark Cube: dark character profiles and OCEAN” (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj.3845">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj.3845</a>). As of the blog release date, this paper has been cited by two sources:
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Peer-reviews-registered-citations.png" alt="PeerJ citations list" height="250px"/></p>
<p align="left">Source: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj.3845">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7717/peerj.3845</a>, CC-BY 4.0</p></p>
<p>What this view of the paper does not reveal is that Láng’s review (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.3845v0.1/reviews/2">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7287/peerj.3845v0.1/reviews/2</a>) provided such insight to the original researchers that the first author (Garcia) incorporates the discussion in his subquent work. This evidence is documented in the citation list of that new publication, “Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences” (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2302-1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2302-1</a>). What a wonderful illustration of the ways in which peer reviews can operate like other publications, and how far is it from being unique. But up to now, we have not yet programmatically captured them in a formal way as we do now with these materials registered properly as a review.</p>
<h3 id="the-evolution-of-crossref-s-piece">The evolution of Crossref’s piece</h3>
<p>In the same spirit of ever evolving knowledge, we also continue to update our schemas based upon community feedback. Are references important? Tell us! What new metadata on peer reviews are important to answer your questions or help you do what you need? Members, if you are interested in registering your peer review content with us, please <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">get in touch</a>.</p>
Org ID: a recap and a hint of things to comehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/org-id-a-recap-and-a-hint-of-things-to-come/
Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000John Chodackihttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/org-id-a-recap-and-a-hint-of-things-to-come/
<p><em>Cross-posted on the blogs of University of California (UC3), ORCID, and DataCite: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/67sj-4y05">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/67sj-4y05</a></em>.</p>
<p>Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose&mdash;California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID&mdash;invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities. As the working group chair, I wanted to provide an update on this initiative and let you know where our efforts are headed.</p>
<h2 id="community-led-effort">Community-led effort</h2>
<p>FIrst, I would like to summarize all of the work that has gone into this project, a truly community-driven initiative, over the last two years:</p>
<ul>
<li>A series of collaborative workshops were held at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in San Antonio TX (2016), the FORCE11 conference in Portland OR (2016), and at PIDapalooza in Reykjavik (2016).</li>
<li>Findings from these workshops were summarized in three documents, which we made openly available to the community for public comment:
<ul>
<li>Organization Identifier Project: A Way Forward (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/2906">PDF</a>)</li>
<li>Organization Identifier Provider Landscape (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/4716">PDF</a>)</li>
<li>Technical Considerations for an Organization Identifier Registry (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/7885">PDF</a>)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>A <a href="https://orcid.org/content/organization-identifier-working-group">Working Group</a> worked throughout 2017 and voted to approve a set of recommendations and principles for &lsquo;governance&rsquo; and &lsquo;product&rsquo;:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://figshare.com/articles/ORG_ID_WG_Governance_Principles_and_Recommendations/5402002/1">Governance Recommendations</a></li>
<li><a href="https://figshare.com/articles/ORG_ID_WG_Product_Principles_and_Recommendations/5402047/1">Product Principles and Recommendations</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li>We then put out a <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5458162.v1">Request for Information</a> that sought expressions of interest from organizations to be involved in implementing and running an organization identifier registry.</li>
<li>There was a really good response to the RFI; reviewing the responses and thinking about next steps led to our most recent <a href="https://orcid.org/content/2018-org-id-meeting">stakeholder meeting in Girona</a> in January 2018, where ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref were tasked with drafting a proposal that meets the Working Group&rsquo;s requirements for a community-led, organizational identifier registry.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="thank-you">Thank you</h2>
<p>I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this effort so far. We&rsquo;ve been able to make good progress with the initiative because of the time and expertise many of you have volunteered. We have truly benefited from the support of the community, with representatives from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; American Physical Society, California Digital Library, Cornell University, Crossref, DataCite, Digital Science, Editeur, Elsevier, Foundation for Earth Sciences, Hindawi, Jisc, ORCID, Ringgold, Springer Nature, The IP Registry, and U.S. Geological Survey involved throughout this initiative. And we couldn&rsquo;t have done any of it without the help and guidance of our consultants, Helen Szigeti and Kristen Ratan.</p>
<h2 id="the-way-forward">The way forward</h2>
<p>The recommendations from our initiative have been converted into a concrete plan for building a registry for research organizations. This plan will be posted in the coming weeks.</p>
<p>The initiative&rsquo;s leadership group has already secured start-up resourcing and is getting ready to announce the launch plan&mdash;more details coming soon. </p>
<p>We hope that all stakeholders will continue to support the next phase of our work &ndash; look for announcements in the coming weeks about how to get involved. </p>
<p>As always, we welcome your feedback and involvement as this effort continues. Please contact me directly with any questions or comments at <a href="mailto:john.chodacki@ucop.edu">john.chodacki@ucop.edu</a>. And thanks again for your help bringing an open organization identifier registry to fruition!</p>
<hr />
<h3 id="references">References</h3>
<p>Bilder, G., Brown, J., &amp; Demeranville, T. (2016). Organisation identifiers: current provider survey. ORCID. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/4716">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/4716</a></p>
<p>Cruse, P., Haak, L., &amp; Pentz, E. (2016). Organization Identifier Project: A Way Forward. ORCID. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/2906">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/2906</a></p>
<p>Fenner, M., Paglione, L., Demeranville, T., &amp; Bilder, G. (2016). Technical Considerations for an Organization Identifier Registry. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/7885">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5438/7885</a></p>
<p>Laurel, H., Bilder, G., Brown, C., Cruse, P., Devenport, T., Fenner, M., … Smith, A. (2017). ORG ID WG Product Principles and Recommendations. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402047">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402047</a></p>
<p>Laurel, H., Pentz, E., Cruse, P., &amp; Chodacki, J. (2017). Organization Identifier Project: Request for Information. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5458162">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5458162</a></p>
<p>Pentz, E., Cruse, P., Laurel, H., &amp; Warner, S. (2017). ORG ID WG Governance Principles and Recommendations. <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402002">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402002</a></p>
3,2,1… it’s ‘lift-off’ for Participation Reportshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/321-its-lift-off-for-participation-reports/
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000Anna Tolwinskahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/321-its-lift-off-for-participation-reports/
<p>Metadata is at the heart of all our services. With a growing range of members participating in our community—often compiling or depositing metadata on behalf of each other—the need to educate and express obligations and best practice has increased. In addition, we’ve seen more and more researchers and tools making use of our APIs to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-5-with-opencitations/">harvest</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-8-with-researchfish/">analyze</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-4-with-cla/">re-purpose</a> the metadata our members register, so we’ve been very aware of the need to be more explicit about what this metadata enables, why, how, and for whom.</p>
<p>This week we take an important step towards this goal with a much-anticipated announcement: Participation reports are in beta release—so come along and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">take a look</a>!</p>
<h3 id="what-does-this-mean">What does this mean?</h3>
<p>Participation Reports gives—for the first time—a clear visualization of the metadata that Crossref has. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Search for any member</a> to find out what percentage of their content includes <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-good-is-your-metadata">10 key elements</a> of information, above and beyond the basic bibliographic metadata that all members are obliged to provide. This includes metadata such as ORCID iDs for contributors, funding acknowledgements, reference lists, and abstracts—richer metadata that makes content more discoverable, and much more useful to the scholarly community as a whole, including among members themselves.</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Prep.png" alt="participation reports dashboard" height="600px" />
</p>
<p>You can filter by content such as journal articles, book chapters, datasets, and preprints, and compare current content (past two calendar years and year-to-date) to back file content (older than that). And within the journal articles view, you can drill down to view the metadata completeness for each individual journal. We hear that editorial boards are keen to see that aspect!</p>
<p>We’re delighted that participation reports are now available in beta. That means that while we are confident that the data shown is accurate, there could be the odd glitch as we monitor use.</p>
<p>Thank you to everyone who has helped us to test the reports and provided so much valuable feedback. We plan to expand and improve participation reports to include additional metadata elements, metadata quality checks, and adherence to Crossref best practice such as DOI display. We’re still listening so do <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">get in touch</a> if you have questions or suggestions, or would like a more detailed walk through. There is also a feedback button right in-situ in the tool.</p>
<hr />
Crossref LIVE and local (to you)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-live-and-local-to-you/
Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-live-and-local-to-you/<p>The last few months have been busy for the Crossref community outreach team. We’ve been out and about from Cape Town to Ulyanovsk—and many places in between—talking at ‘LIVE locals’ to members about all things metadata.
Our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">LIVE locals</a> are one-day events, held around the world—but local to you—that provide both deeper insight into Crossref, and information on our services and how to benefit from them. These events are always free to attend, and whether you are a long-established member, totally new, or not even a member at all, we welcome you all to join us.</p>
<p>At our most recent events we collaborated with some fantastic organizations and welcomed attendees from a variety of backgrounds including editors, publishers, service providers, researchers and other metadata users.</p>
<h2 id="south-africa">South Africa</h2>
<p>In April <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/chuck-koscher/">Chuck Koscher</a>, Director of Technology, and I travelled to South Africa for two LIVE locals, one in Pretoria and the other in Cape Town—and both in collaboration with the <a href="http://www.assaf.co.za/newsletter/?p=2030">Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)</a>. ASSAf also provided two excellent speakers, Nadine Wubbeling (ASSAf) and Pierre de Villiers (<a href="https://aosis.co.za/">AOSIS</a>), who shared their experiences with Crossref and presented valuable insights into the work that they do.</p>
<p>Delivering events for a varied audience like this means there are often differing levels of knowledge and experience. So, to make sure everyone benefited from our sessions, we covered the different ways you can work with the Crossref deposit system as an XML pro, or an absolute beginner. This included a live demonstration of our new deposit tool Metadata Manager (currently in beta) which should help those less technically-minded people (like myself), and be a big improvement upon our current web deposit form.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dr-pierre.jpg" alt="Dr. Pierre de Villiers" height="250px" width="300px"/>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/table-mountain2.jpg" alt="Table Mountain" height="250px" width="300px"/>|
</div>
<p>The day ended with a technical session, where attendees discussed specific issues they needed help with, which mainly focussed on retrieving metadata in the Crossref system, interpreting reports, and support with XML.</p>
<p><em>Images left to right: Dr. Pierre de Villiers talks about the Crossref Experience at AOSIS, and the stunning scenery of Table Mountain provided a nice backdrop to our Cape Town event.</em></p>
<h2 id="russia">Russia</h2>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just back from a few days in Russia 🇷🇺. We ran a <a href="https://twitter.com/CrossrefOrg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CrossrefOrg</a> LIVE local in Ulyanovsk for 60 editors, made plans to do more education and outreach in the region and caught a <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FifaWorldCup2018?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FifaWorldCup2018</a> game... <a href="https://t.co/GSdNEujJXa">pic.twitter.com/GSdNEujJXa</a></p>&mdash; Rachael Lammey (@rachaellammey) <a href="https://twitter.com/rachaellammey/status/1010040188406587393?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 22, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div>
<p>The World Cup wasn’t the only big event in Russia last month. That’s right, we were there too—with our very first Russian LIVE local! On the 19th June, 60 attendees from a range of academic and publishing institutions joined us at <a href="http://www.ulspu.ru/">The Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University</a>.
<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/rachael-lammey/">Rachael Lammey</a> and I introduced Crossref, the role of identifiers, and how to register different content types with us. We also discussed the use and importance of providing accurate and comprehensive metadata, and shared some interesting use cases.</p>
<p>Guest speaker Professor Zinaida Kuznetsova talked about her experiences of working with Crossref and the benefits of being a member. This was complimented by a talk by fellow guest speaker Maxim Mitrofanov from Crossref sponsoring organisation, <a href="https://neicon.ru/">NEICON</a>. Maxim explained how NEICON work with Crossref, and provide services for the smaller members they support. Maxim is also one of our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/our-ambassadors/">Crossref Ambassadors</a> - and he will be running more Russian webinars on our services in the near future, so look out for those listed on our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/webinars/">webinar page</a>!</p>
<p>We’d like to say a big thank you to the team at Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University for their support and help with the event. Also thanks to our fantastic interpreters who helped us immensely by relaying the information to the audience in Russian, as well as helping to translate and answer questions.</p>
<h2 id="germany">Germany</h2>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<center><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Najko Jahn from Göttingen State and University Library talks about how he uses <a href="https://twitter.com/CrossrefOrg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CrossrefOrg</a> metadata in his work <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CRLIVEGermany?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CRLIVEGermany</a> <a href="https://t.co/Y89ZkBMoSh">pic.twitter.com/Y89ZkBMoSh</a></p>&mdash; Vanessa Fairhurst (@NessaFairhurst) <a href="https://twitter.com/NessaFairhurst/status/1011902317828993024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 27, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></center>
</div>
<p>One week later and we were in Hannover, Germany. Crossref’s <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/laura-j-wilkinson/">Laura Wilkinson</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/joe-wass/">Joe Wass</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jennifer-kemp/">Jennifer Kemp</a> joined me for this event, which was held in collaboration with the German National Library of Science and Technology (<a href="https://www.tib.eu/en/service/news/details/metadaten-unverzichtbarer-rohstoff-im-digitalen-zeitalter/">Technische Informationsbibliothek - TIB</a> at their impressive venue in on the 27th June. ￼</p>
<p>The day focused on all things metadata - how it can be used and why good metadata is important. This included taking a look at our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">Participation Reports</a> tool and a fascinating talk from guest speaker Najko Jahn from <a href="https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/sub-aktuell/">Göttingen State and University Library</a> on the benefits of using Crossref metadata for libraries and scientists.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.datacite.org/">Datacite’s</a> Britta Dreyer also spoke about how DataCite and Crossref support research data sharing, before Joe Wass and I presented updates to the collaborative <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/organization-identifier/">Org ID project</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a> service. The day concluded with us sharing more ways to participate in Crossref and other community initiatives.</p>
<h2 id="questions-вопросов-fragen">Questions? Вопросов? Fragen?</h2>
<p>Over the course of these events we were asked many questions—and here are some of the more interesting/common ones posed to the team: <br></p>
<p>Q. Do I have to join Crossref directly, or can I join as part of a group of smaller organizations? <br>
A. You don’t have to be a direct member, you can join via a Sponsor. See our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/sponsors/">sponsors page</a> for a list of Sponsors in your area, and for more information on becoming a Sponsor.<br></p>
<p>Q. Can I link translations of works together? <br>
A. Yes, a journal article published in two languages can each be assigned its own DOI, and then linked in the metadata using the <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426">relationship type</a> <code>TranslationOf</code> from our schema.<br></p>
<p>Q. Does the web deposit form support depositing abstracts and references?<br>
A. No, it doesn’t. However, our new Metadata Manager tool does and if you are in interested in trying it out in beta, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">let us know</a>.<br></p>
<p>Q. Can I share your new Participation Report tool with my colleagues?<br>
A. Yes you can! It’s open and available for use, just come along and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/members/prep/">search for a member</a>.<br></p>
<p>Q. Can I also register book chapters, dissertations and other content types under the same prefix?<br>
A. Yes you can. You can register any of the different <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213123586-Metadata-and-content-type-overview">content types we support</a> under one prefix.<br></p>
<p>Q. Will you be doing more events in this region in future?<br>
A. We hope so, and we are always happy to hear from those who wish to collaborate on future events, so just <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">contact us</a> to get involved.</p>
<hr />Status, I am newhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/status-i-am-new/
Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000Isaac Farleyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/status-i-am-new/<p>Hi, I’m Isaac. I’m new here. What better way to get to know me than through a blog post? Well, maybe a cocktail party, but this will have to do. In addition to giving you some details about myself in this post, I’ll be introducing our <a href="http://0-status.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">status page</a>, too.</p>
<h3 id="a-little-about-me">A little about me</h3>
<p>In mid-April, I began as the new Support Manager. My goal is to fill the very large shoes left by Patricia Feeney moving into the Head of Metadata role. I know Patricia knows Crossref and the rich community of members (and metadata!) inside and out. I’ll get there too. For now, I have immersed myself in tackling as many of your support questions as possible, so I may have already met some of you on a support ticket. If so, thanks for your patience; you likely have already taught me a thing or two!</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/isaac.jpg" alt="Isaac, on the lookout to provide you excellent support" height="250px" width="250px" />
</p>
<p align="center">Isaac, on the lookout to provide you excellent support</p>
<p>I came to this position from one of our members – the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, where I served as the Digital Publications Manager for the last five years. Like many of you, I was always impressed, intrigued, and excited by the work underway at Crossref and wanted to be a part of the team. So, here I am, very much looking forward to the challenge ahead.</p>
<p>I work remotely from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live with my wife and two daughters. Tulsa doesn’t have as many members as D.C., London, or Jakarta, but I hope to meet some of you during outreach trips, LIVE events, online in a webinar, or in our support community.</p>
<p>One of the things that attracts me to being a part of this community are our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/truths/">truths</a>. As a quick reminder, the truths are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Come one, come all</li>
<li>One member, one vote</li>
<li>Smart alone, brilliant together</li>
<li>Love metadata, love technology</li>
<li>What you see, what you get</li>
<li>Here today, here tomorrow</li>
</ul>
<p>I am drawn to forward-thinking, action-oriented communities that value collaboration and openness. These truths, and the ten weeks I have been at Crossref, have confirmed that this is one of those communities. As your new support manager, I want to emphasize our commitment to transparency: Ask me anything; I’ll tell you what I know. In that spirit, I have the privilege of introducing our new status page—a key piece in furthering our own transparency and openness.</p>
<p><a href="http://0-status.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">status.crossref.org</a></p>
<p>Our new status page provides critical, real-time information about our services—it helps us tell our overall story. If you are looking for metrics on the performance of our APIs, websites, the deposit system, or new beta services, bookmark this page. The system metrics provide daily, weekly, and monthly overviews of each of our services’ response time (in milliseconds) and uptime, or percentage of time that service has been operational during your selected time span (daily, weekly, or monthly).</p>
<p>From this page, we’ll announce planned maintenance and keep you regularly updated when we have an incident. And, we’ll provide regular status updates for these incidents when in progress, updated, and completed.</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/support .jpg" alt="Our new status page" height="750px" width="550px" />
</p>
<p align="center">Our new status page – status.crossref.org</p>
<p>I encourage you to subscribe to the updates from the top-right corner of the page. While we’ll update this page with any service-related outages, subscribing for notifications will allow you to stay current on the latest. We’ll describe maintenance and incidents clearly, simply, and timely when we have them. And, if we don’t, call us on it.</p>
<p>If you have questions about the performance of our services, the status page is a great starting place. If you still have questions, ask us, we’ll tell you what we know.</p>
<hr />Using the Crossref REST API. Part 9 (with Dimensions)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-9-with-dimensions/
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-9-with-dimensions/<p>Continuing our <a href="https://crossref.org/categories/api-case-study/">blog series</a> highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to the team behind new search and discovery tool <a href="https://www.dimensions.ai/">Dimensions</a>: Daniel Hook, Digital Science CEO; Christian Herzog, ÜberResearch CEO; and Simon Porter, Director of Innovation. They talk about the work they’re doing, the collaborative approach, and how Dimensions uses the Crossref REST API as part of our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/plus-service/">Metadata Plus service</a>, to augment other data and their workflow.</p>
<h3 id="introducing-dimensions">Introducing Dimensions</h3>
<p><a href="https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication">Dimensions</a> is a next-generation approach to discovering, connecting with and contextualising research. Modern academics need data about the research ecosystem in which they exist as much as the administrators who develop institutional research strategies. All academics are now required to think long-range about their research projects, contextualise their research, and demonstrate the impact of their program. Additionally, they need to find funding, ensure that students go on to good positions, and hire talented colleagues whose skills fit well with ongoing projects. Dimensions gives the first fully-linked view of publications, grants, patents and clinical trials in an analytically-centred user experience.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dimensions-1-1.jpg" alt="Dimensions sample screen" width="100%" /></p>
<h3 id="how-is-crossref-data-used-within-dimensions">How is Crossref data used within Dimensions?</h3>
<p>For an article to appear in Dimensions it must have a Crossref DOI, so it would not be possible to create Dimensions’ Publication index without Crossref’s data. Dimensions is built on several principles that we’ve talked about before. Here the most relevant of those principles are:</p>
<ul>
<li>unique identifiers should underlie everything that we do;</li>
<li>data should not be inclusive and the tool should allow the user to select what they want to see;</li>
<li>data should be more available to our community;</li>
<li>data should be presented with as much contextual information as possible;</li>
<li>the community should have enough data available to be able to create and experiment with their own metrics and indicators.</li>
</ul>
<p>In the context of these principles, Crossref makes a perfect starting place to create a tool like Dimensions. We use the Crossref data to know about our possible “universe” of articles. We then enhance the Crossref core with data from several different places: open access publications in the DOAJ, PubMed, BioArXiv, and through relationships with publishers. In all, 60 million of the 95 million articles in the Dimensions index have a full text version that we can text and data mine for additional information.</p>
<p>In Dimensions’ enhancement stage we can extract address information (where not included in the original Crossref record) and map it to <a href="https://grid.ac/">GRID</a> funding information and the list of funders in Crossref’s Funder Registry as well as to our database of grants in Dimensions.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dimensions-2-1.jpg" alt="Extracting information with Dimensions" width="100%" /></p>
<h3 id="how-have-you-incorporated-citation-data">How have you incorporated citation data?</h3>
<p>Access to citations has historically been a thorny issue for citations databases. However, <a href="https://i4oc.org/">I4OC</a> celebrated its first anniversary in April this year and this project has been a key driver in helping us to build Dimensions with the level of citation coverage that we managed –– it is a fantastic enabling initiative and should be warmly welcomed by the sector. Crossref is not the only source we were able to use to gather citation data; some text mining was needed to get a full graph. Dimensions goes beyond inter-article citations and includes links between patents and publications, links between clinical trials and publications, and Altmetric mentions of publications.</p>
<h3 id="is-dimensions-openly-available">Is Dimensions openly available?</h3>
<p>Given that there is so much open data in Dimensions, it was always our intention to give a free version to the community. If you visit <a href="https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication">http://app.dimensions.ai</a> then you’ll be able to play with the system and use it for your research. While only the publications index is fully open, when you see a link to a grant, patent or clinical trial in an article detail page, you’ll be able to navigate to that record so that you can see the full context of the data.</p>
<p>Beyond the ability to link the publications, Dimensions also displays the CV information which the researcher made visible publicly.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dimensions-4-1.jpg" alt="orcid record" width="80%" class="img-responsive" /></p>
<p>Most recently, we’ve integrated ORCID into Dimensions. This means that you can push data from Dimensions into ORCID if you connect your ORCID account to your Dimensions account.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dimensions-3-1.jpg" alt="CV information" width="80%" lass="img-responsive" /></p>
<h3 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-dimensions">What are the future plans for Dimensions?</h3>
<p>Dimensions is still moving quickly and adding more functionality. Our aim is to release more data facets very soon. We plan to add a Policy Document archive and a Research Data archive. We’ve already found some fascinating insights from joining the existing data together and these two new archives should add even more interesting data.</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-dimensions-like-to-see-in-crossref-metadata">What else would Dimensions like to see in Crossref metadata?</h3>
<p>Open access information is something that we work with <a href="https://unpaywall.org/">Unpaywall</a> to source for Dimensions right now. It would be great if Crossref and Unpaywall could work together to make this data higher quality and more ubiquitous.</p>
<hr />
<p>Thank you Daniel, Christian and Simon.</p>
<p>If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>Meet the members, Part 3 (with INASP)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/meet-the-members-part-3-with-inasp/
Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/meet-the-members-part-3-with-inasp/<p>Next in our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/meet-the-members/"><em>Meet the members</em></a> blog series is INASP, who isn’t a direct member, but acts as a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/sponsors">Sponsor</a> for hundreds of members. Sioux Cumming, Programme Specialist at <a href="https://www.inasp.info/home">INASP</a> tells us a bit about the work they’re doing, how they use Crossref and what the future plans for INASP are.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/INASP.jpg" alt=“INASP logo" height="150px" width="250px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<h3 id="can-you-tell-us-a-little-bit-about-inasp">Can you tell us a little bit about INASP?</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.inasp.info/home">INASP</a> is an international development organization working with a global network of partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia. We have a vision of research and knowledge at the heart of development, so are working to support individuals and institutions to produce, share and use research and knowledge, which can transform lives.</p>
<p>Our work includes strengthening research communication, which we do via AuthorAID (supporting researchers, especially early-career researchers, in getting their research published); improving information access (supporting library consortia with access to international journals and other online resources); supporting evidence use in policy making; working with higher-education institutions to improve critical thinking skills; improving gender equity in research systems; and my area, which I’ll talk more about below, supporting academic publishing in the Global South.</p>
<p>INASP’s approaches are based on the core pillars of capacity development, convening, influencing and working in partnership. INASP promotes equity by actively addressing the needs of both men and women across all our work and addressing issues of power within the research and knowledge system.</p>
<h3 id="what-s-your-role-within-inasp">What’s your role within INASP?</h3>
<p>I’m a Programme Specialist and since I started at INASP 15 years ago I’ve been responsible for our <a href="https://www.inasp.info/theme/academic-publishing">academic publishing work</a>. This work supports increased visibility, accessibility and quality of peer-reviewed journals published in developing countries so that the research outputs that are produced in these countries can be found, shared and used more effectively.</p>
<p>We recognize two big challenges for Southern journals in playing their part in global research systems. The first is awareness of Southern journals, many of which were until recently only available in print. Supporting editors and national organizations to put their journals online on central platforms (the Journals Online platforms) has helped increase their visibility.</p>
<p>We have also provided support to the local management teams in communicating about the platforms, the journals and the research they publish, and we recently published a Handbook for Journal Editors - <a href="https://www.inasp.info/editorshandbook">www.inasp.info/editorshandbook</a>. This is intended to be a free resource for editors worldwide that can be used as a stand-alone handbook or as an accompaniment to the journal quality online course that we are currently developing.</p>
<p>The second challenge is supporting publishing quality and enabling Southern journals to demonstrate their quality so they will be regarded as credible. In the early days, this, for me, was largely about providing training and mentoring for journal editors and Journals Online platform managers about standard publishing practices.</p>
<p>More recently, as local handover progressed, our role shifted towards helping journals to demonstrate their credibility. Last September INASP and African Journals Online launched our Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) <a href="https://www.journalquality.info/en/">framework</a> for assessing the quality of Southern publishing processes. This has been really well received by the international publishing sector and by the journal editors we work with.</p>
<h3 id="tell-us-a-bit-about-who-you-support-and-how-you-support-them">Tell us a bit about who you support, and how you support them</h3>
<p>We support others communicating their research and finding out about the research of others.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The five Journals Online platforms that were handed over to local management at the end of March collectively host 397 journals from Bangladesh, El Salvador, Honduras, Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These platforms help the research from these countries to become even more integrated in the global research community. Some fascinating and valuable research is published in the journals on these platforms. You can see some <a href="https://www.inasp.info/publications/helping-southern-research-reach-global-audience">examples</a> of this research in this article about a small piece of work we did with these platforms to commission and disseminate press releases of some of the research.</p>
<h3 id="what-s-your-participation-level-with-crossref">What’s your participation level with Crossref?</h3>
<p>INASP has been a Crossref Sponsoring Organization for the Journals Online platforms since 2008 and all articles on the sites have DOIs assigned to them (approximately 50,000 articles). All the in-country training sessions for journal editors publishing via the JOL platforms have included sessions to explain how DOIs work and why they are important. We have also trained editors on how to find and include the DOIs for the references of their articles. More recently, in 2015, we provided access to the Crossref Similarity Check service to editors, which enabled them to improve the quality of their submissions by identifying instances of plagiarism before the articles were published.</p>
<h3 id="what-trends-are-you-seeing-in-your-part-of-the-scholarly-communications-community">What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly communications community?</h3>
<p>Demonstrating credibility of journals is an important part of journal publishing today. There are so many journals worldwide and it is a tough challenge for authors and readers to navigate this sector – a challenge that we often see through the discussions in our AuthorAID network. But it is important that researchers don’t simply turn to the handful of well-known publishers in the Global North that have dominated scholarly discourse to date.</p>
<p>To really tackle global issues and increase equality in global research we need to work towards levelling the playing field and including all voices – and this challenge needs to be embraced across the global research and knowledge system. We have seen encouraging signs over the past couple of years of magazines, blogs, conference organizers and industry groups in the Global North approaching us to help bring in more global perspectives to scholarly discussions. However, there is plenty more to be done and we are particularly focusing on equity in our new areas of work.</p>
<h3 id="how-would-you-describe-the-value-of-being-a-crossref-sponsoring-organization">How would you describe the value of being a Crossref Sponsoring Organization?</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>Collaboration with Crossref over the past few years has been one of a number of ways that we have been able to connect small, scholar-led titles in the Global South with the latest global standards and approaches in scholarly publishing. This is important as it all helps to level the playing field.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Including DOIs in papers is one of the criteria for being awarded a JPPS star and thus the journals are incentivized to understand and use them more.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-inasp-s-plans-for-the-future">What are INASP’s plans for the future?</h3>
<p>INASP has recently completed a major five-year programme of work with a significant focus on strengthening organizations in the countries we have been working in and handing over responsibility for managing things like the Journals Online platforms. We are now in a new phase of work, building on what has gone before but with a particular emphasis on improving equity both within and between research systems.</p>
<p>Many challenges remain – the global research system still tends to be biased towards the Global North. From an academic publishing perspective this is apparent both in terms of awareness of journals and also in terms of impressions of credibility. JPPS is intended to tackle the latter challenge but it is still early days – we only announced the first badges awarded a few months ago. Over the next few years we will be building on and strengthening this work and ensuring that it is an important part of the processes for journal editors and for authors and readers.</p>
<p>Thank you Sioux for your participation in our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/meet-the-members/"><em>Meet the members</em></a> series. If your organization would like to feature in this series, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">please get in touch</a>.
<br></p>Preprints growth rate ten times higher than journal articleshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/preprints-growth-rate-ten-times-higher-than-journal-articles/
Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/preprints-growth-rate-ten-times-higher-than-journal-articles/<p>The Crossref graph of the research enterprise is growing at an impressive rate of 2.5 million records a month - scholarly communications of all stripes and sizes. Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content. While preprints may not be new, the growth may well be: ~30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period). We began supporting preprints in November 2016 at the behest of our members. When members register them, we ensure that: links to these publications persist over time; they are connected to the full history of the shared research results; and the citation record is clear and up-to-date.</p>
<h3 id="summary">Summary</h3>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig1-preprints-growth-chart.png" alt="number of preprints registered" width="80%" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>As of May 24, 2018 we have 44,388 works (see API query <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works</a> with a json viewer) registered as posted content. Today that number is <span class='withcommas'>136605</span>
. Preprints are part of this content type category, which is meant to house scholarly outputs that have been posted online and intended for publication in the future.</p>
<p>For a more granular view, see the monthly stats captured by Jordan Anaya in <a href="http://www.prepubmed.org/monthly_stats/">PrePubMed</a>. This data is based on a slightly different set of preprint repositories, though both show the same trends.</p>
<p>The figure below shows the preprints registered with Crossref, broken down by repository.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig2-preprints-count-by-repo.png" alt="number of preprints by publisher" width="100%" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>We eagerly await our newest preprints member, Center for Open Science, who will soon be registering the preprints from their 18 community archives with us (~9k preprints total to date).</p>
<h3 id="metadata-coverage">Metadata coverage</h3>
<p>We accept a range of metadata for the preprints registered with us, including:</p>
<ul>
<li>Repository name &amp; hosting platform</li>
<li>Contributor names &amp; ORCID iDs</li>
<li>Title</li>
<li>Dates (posted, accepted)</li>
<li>License</li>
<li>Funding</li>
<li>Abstract</li>
<li>Relations</li>
<li>References</li>
</ul>
<p>As with all content types, certain metadata is required, though others are optional. We encourage full coverage of metadata in the record where applicable and possible. So what are publishers including in their posted content records? The summary view is as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>License: <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works?filter=has-license:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">9926 (json)</a>, 22% (PeerJ Preprints, ChemRxiv)</li>
<li>Funder: <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works?filter=has-funder:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">0 (json)</a>, 0%</li>
<li>ORCID: <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works?filter=has-orcid:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">19309 (json)</a>, 44% (bioRxiv, PeerJ Preprints, Preprints.org, ChemRxiv)</li>
<li>Abstracts: <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works?filter=has-abstract:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">35874 (json)</a>, 81% (bioRxiv, PeerJ Preprints, ChemRxiv)</li>
<li>References: <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works?filter=has-references:true&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">1921 (json)</a>:, 4% (JMIR)</li>
</ul>
<p>Compared to all the published content registered with us over time, preprints have above average coverage of ORCID iDs deposited and show well above average with abstract metadata. However, they are significantly lagging behind with depositing references, license, and funding metadata. (See a summary of the full corpus stats taken two months ago in the blog post, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-lustrum-over-the-weekend/">A Lustrum over the Weekend</a>.</p>
<h3 id="preprint-article-pairs">Preprint-article pairs</h3>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig3-preprint-articles.png" alt="number of citations for preprints" width="80%" class="img-responsive"/>
</div>
<p>Members registering preprints have an obligation to update the metadata record when a journal article is subsequently published, to clearly identify this work. This pairing is passed on to our metadata users: indexing platforms; recommendations engines; platforms; tools, etc. which pull from our APIs. (The preprint landing page also must link to the article.) As such, the preprint-article pairings are amassing as each week passes. We currently have a total of <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=relation.type:is-preprint-of&amp;facet=publisher-name:*&amp;rows=0">12983 (json)</a> preprints connected to articles. The figure below provides the counts based on repository.</p>
<h3 id="citations">Citations</h3>
<p>We can see from preprint Cited-by counts that researchers are indeed citing preprints in their articles. This practice is an extension of the common citation behavior to provide evidence for and credit to previous work, a natural consequence of work shared with their peers. The <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/types/posted-content/works?sort=is-referenced-by-count&amp;order=desc">most highly cited preprint papers (json)</a> as of May 24, 2018 are as follows. In some cases, a subsequent paper was published from the results shared in the preprint. These have also accrued citations in their own right and these are also indicated in the table below.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>No.</th>
<th>Cited-by</th>
<th>Preprint DOI</th>
<th>Preprint title</th>
<th>Date</th>
<th>Subsequent journal article</th>
<th align="center">Citations of journal article</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>Cited-by 72</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/005165">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/005165</a></td>
<td>qqman: an R package for visualizing GWAS results using Q-Q and manhattan plots</td>
<td>May 14, 2014.</td>
<td>n/a</td>
<td align="center">n/a</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2</td>
<td>Cited-by 63</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/002824">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/002824</a></td>
<td>HTSeq - A Python framework to work with high-throughput sequencing data</td>
<td>August 19, 2014</td>
<td>Bioinformatics, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu638">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu638</a></td>
<td align="center">2372</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>Cited-by 43</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/030338">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/030338</a></td>
<td>Analysis of protein-coding genetic variation in 60,706 humans</td>
<td>May 10, 2016</td>
<td>Nature, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1038/nature19057">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1038/nature19057</a></td>
<td align="center">1598</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>Cited-by 38</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/002832">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/002832</a></td>
<td>Moderated estimation of fold change and dispersion for RNA-seq data with DESeq2</td>
<td>November 17, 2014</td>
<td>Genome Biology, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1186/s13059-014-0550-8">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1186/s13059-014-0550-8</a></td>
<td align="center">3284</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5</td>
<td>Cited-by 32</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/021592">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/021592</a></td>
<td>Salmon provides accurate, fast, and bias-aware transcript expression estimates using dual-phase inference</td>
<td>August 30, 2016</td>
<td>Nature Methods, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1038/nmeth.4197">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1038/nmeth.4197</a></td>
<td align="center">112</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>6</td>
<td>Cited-by 22</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/012401">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/012401</a></td>
<td>DensiTree 2: Seeing Trees Through the Forest</td>
<td>December 8, 2014</td>
<td>n/a</td>
<td align="center">n/a</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>7</td>
<td>Cited-by 21</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/011650">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/011650</a></td>
<td>FusionCatcher - a tool for finding somatic fusion genes in paired-end RNA-sequencing data</td>
<td>November 19, 2014</td>
<td>n/a</td>
<td align="center">n/a</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>8</td>
<td>Cited-by 19</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/048991">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/048991</a></td>
<td>Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain</td>
<td>September 6, 2017</td>
<td>n/a</td>
<td align="center">n/a</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>9</td>
<td>Cited-by 18</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/006395">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/006395</a></td>
<td>Error correction and assembly complexity of single molecule sequencing reads</td>
<td>June 18, 2014</td>
<td>n/a</td>
<td align="center">n/a</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10</td>
<td>Cited-by 18</td>
<td><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/032839">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/032839</a></td>
<td>Spread of the pandemic Zika virus lineage is associated with NS1 codon usage adaptation in humans</td>
<td>November 25, 2015</td>
<td>n/a</td>
<td align="center">n/a</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br>
The relationship between preprints and the proceeding publication is an interesting area that is not yet well understood. We invite the community to analyze the Crossref metadata using the REST API in concert with other datasets. For example, the citation lifecycle for these two research products has been one of speculation so far without a systematic investigation into patterns and timeframes of preprint citations and those of its succeeding article across the corpus. Here, submission dates would be critical data to this research question as publication windows vary significantly by publisher and by paper.</p>Linking references is different from depositing referenceshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linking-references-is-different-from-depositing-references/
Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000Anna Tolwinskahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linking-references-is-different-from-depositing-references/
<p>From time to time we get questions from members asking what the difference is between reference linking and depositing references as part the content registration process.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s the distinction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Linking out to other articles from your reference lists is a key part of being a Crossref members - it&rsquo;s an obligation in the membership agreement and it levels the playing field when all members link their references to one another. Depositing references when you register your content is completely different. It&rsquo;s enriching the metadata record that describes your content, and it allows Crossref and others&mdash;including non-members&mdash;to use them.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="reference-linking">Reference Linking</h3>
<p>A research article usually includes a reference list of citations to other works that helped inform it. The original function of Crossref was to provide a central service for publishers that enabled them to link to each others&rsquo; content from these reference lists&mdash;using a DOI as a persistent link. This meant that members of all sizes and in all disciplines could easily link to one another without having to sign hundreds of bilateral agreements.</p>
<p>We made Reference Linking <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/terms">obligatory</a> for Crossref members because it&rsquo;s fundamental to making content discoverable, and because when everyone links their references, research travels further and benefits everyone.</p>
<h3 id="depositing-references">Depositing references</h3>
<p>Every single day hundreds of members register and update their metadata with us&mdash;and every single day hundreds of organizations search for, extract and use it. To make sure your content is discovered in this process, it&rsquo;s important to make the metadata you register with us as rich as possible. Rich metadata includes information such as journal title, article author, publication date, page numbers, ISSN, abstracts, ORCID iDs, funding information, clinical trials numbers, license information, and of course&mdash;references.</p>
<p>Additionally, registering references is a prerequisite for participating in our Cited-by service&mdash;which provides citation counts and lists, and ultimately makes your content more discoverable.</p>
<p>We know it&rsquo;s not easy for smaller publishers to deposit references. Our upcoming Metadata Manager tool will allow you to register your references at the same time as the rest of your content. This service is currently in development but <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">let us know if you want to try it out</a>.</p>
<div class='shortcode-row'>
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 no-first-para-highlight"><h3 id="reference-linking">Reference Linking</h3>
<p>Reference Linking means adding Crossref DOI links to the reference list for journal articles on your article pages as per this example: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1088/1367-2630/1/1/006">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1088/1367-2630/1/1/006</a>.</p>
<h4 id="how-it-works">How it works</h4>
<p>First retrieve DOIs for all available references either through our <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">human</a> or <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">machine</a> interfaces. Then make sure you use the DOI link in your references and on your article landing page using the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines/">Crossref DOI display guidelines</a>.</p>
<h4 id="why-it-s-useful">Why it’s useful</h4>
<p>Reference Linking:</p>
<ul>
<li>Enables you to link to more than 10,000 publishers without having to sign multiple agreements</li>
<li>Helps with discoverability, because DOIs don’t break if implemented correctly</li>
<li>Displays your DOIs as URLs so that anyone can copy and share them</li>
<li>Makes your content more useful to readers</li>
<li>Drives traffic to your website from other publishers.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="is-it-obligatory">Is it obligatory?</h4>
<p>Yes, within a short time after becoming a member and only for the journal content type. It’s encouraged for other content types.</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 no-first-para-highlight"><h3 id="registering-references">Registering References</h3>
<p>Registering references means submitting them as part of your Crossref metadata deposit as per this example:
<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/xml-samples/article_with_references.xml">https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/xml-samples/article_with_references.xml</a>.</p>
<h4 id="how-it-works">How it works</h4>
<p>Whenever you register content with us, make sure you include your references in the submission. You can also add references to your existing content via a <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213022486-Updating-your-metadata">metadata re-deposit</a>, or our <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214002366">resource deposit</a>, or our <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214236226">Simple Text Query form</a>.</p>
<h4 id="why-it-s-useful">Why it’s useful</h4>
<p>References registered as part of your metadata:</p>
<ul>
<li>Make your content more discoverable</li>
<li>Make your content richer and more useful</li>
<li>Are required to participate in our Cited-by service (this service shows what articles cite your article)</li>
<li>Enables discovery of research</li>
<li>Enables evaluation of research</li>
<li>Highlights your contents’ provenance</li>
<li>Helps with citation counts.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="is-it-obligatory">Is it obligatory?</h4>
<p>No, it’s optional, but strongly encouraged. It is required however if you are participating in our Cited-by service.</p>
</div>
</div>
<hr />
<p>If you have any questions about reference linking or registering your references please <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">get in touch in </a>.</p>
SSP roadtrip for the Crossref teamhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/ssp-roadtrip-for-the-crossref-team/
Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000Amanda Bartellhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/ssp-roadtrip-for-the-crossref-team/<p>What do you think of when you think of Chicago? Deep dish pizza? Art Deco architecture?</p>
<p>Well for one week only this year you can add scholarly publishing to the list as the #SSP2018 Conference comes to town. Some Crossref people are excited to be heading out for the conference, and we&rsquo;re looking forward to meeting as many of our members as possible.</p>
<p>Come along to <strong>stand 212A</strong> and talk to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/anna-tolwinska/">Anna Tolwinska</a> about Participation Reports. Although this new tool is still in beta, she&rsquo;s giving SSP attendees a sneak peek and the chance to get an early look at whether they (and over 10 000 other members) are registering the ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required metadata. You&rsquo;ll get real insight into what metadata you&rsquo;re registering, even if this work is done by a third party or other department.</p>
<p>Thinking about registering preprints or including data citations? Want to find out more about our forthcoming Event Data service? Our product director <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jennifer-lin/">Jennifer Lin</a> will be able to give you the ins and outs of all our latest services so do keep an eye out for her at the conference.</p>
<p>Speaking of third parties, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/amanda-bartell/">I&rsquo;ll</a> will be popping along to the &ldquo;Thinking the Unthinkable, or How to Prepare for a Platform Migration&rdquo; pre meeting seminar on Wednesday with copies of our new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/service-providers/platform-checklist">Platform Migration Checklist</a> and lots of hints and tips to help form a new platform migration guide which will help members have a smooth transition when thinking of moving providers.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/shayn-smulyan/">Shayn Smulyan</a> will be attending the ORCID breakfast meeting on Thursday morning, so come and say hello if you have any questions about how ORCID and Crossref work together. Shayn is one of our support specialists, so he&rsquo;ll be able to help you with any other technical queries you may have.</p>
<p>Our tech director <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/chuck-koscher/">Chuck Koscher</a> will be keen to hone in on members&rsquo; advanced questions about Content Registration, citation matching, and any and all schema deets. So seek him out if you have deep technical questions.</p>
<p>Want to find out more about <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata 2020</a>, the new campaign to improve metadata for research? <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/rosa-clark/">Rosa Clark</a> will be able to give you the lowdown, and even better - she has stickers!</p>
<p>And don&rsquo;t feel left out if you aren&rsquo;t a member but work closely with Crossref. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/jennifer-kemp/">Jennifer Kemp</a> will be on hand to answer all your metadata use and reuse questions, she&rsquo;ll be looking forward to chatting with all kinds of service providers, platforms, and tools.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;re looking forward to seeing you there!</p>
How good is your metadata?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-good-is-your-metadata/
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000Kirsty Meddingshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-good-is-your-metadata/<p>Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics.</p>
<p>Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give&mdash;for the first time&mdash;a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. This is data that&rsquo;s long been available via our Public REST API, now visualized.</p>
<h3 id="who-are-participation-reports-for-everyone">Who are participation reports for? Everyone!</h3>
<p>It&rsquo;s an opportunity to evaluate and educate. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.</p>
<p>Monitor what metadata is being registered, even if this work is done by a third party or another department. And see what other organizations in scholarly communications see when they use Crossref metadata in their research, tools, and services.</p>
<p>The beta release—expected after acceptance testing some time late May—will let anyone look up any of our <span class='withcommas'>13840</span>
members and see whether they are registering ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required bibliographic metadata.</p>
<h3 id="what-do-we-mean-by-richer-metadata">What do we mean by ‘richer metadata’?</h3>
<p>The ten checks for Beta, will be:</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/checklist.png" alt=“checklist" height="250px" width="200px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<ul>
<li>References</li>
<li>Open references (i.e., make references publicly available)</li>
<li>ORCID iDs</li>
<li>Funder IDs</li>
<li>Funding award numbers</li>
<li>Crossmark metadata</li>
<li>License information</li>
<li>Full text links</li>
<li>Similarity Check URLs</li>
<li>Abstracts</li>
</ul>
<p>Each of these additional metadata elements helps increase discovery and wider and more varied use&mdash;and usefulness&mdash;of research outputs.</p>
<h3 id="why-are-we-doing-this-and-what-do-we-mean-by-participation">Why are we doing this and what do we mean by ‘participation’?</h3>
<p>Over the years when we’ve talked with our members about their metadata, we learned that many just can’t be certain exactly how they’re performing. It could be that they’ve outsourced <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration">Content Registration</a> to another service provider or larger publisher, or it could be they just weren’t previously aware they could collect and share authors’ ORCID iDs, Funder IDs, and so on. So our primary aim is to give our members the information they need in order to make a case for improving their metadata records. Each check will come with information about why it is important and guidance on how to improve. Additionally, with the growing use of Crossref as a central source of metadata for the research community, it’s in everyone’s interest to be as transparent as possible about what metadata we have - and encourage greater understanding of what’s possible.</p>
<p>Member ‘participation’ is an important concept. Crossref <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/benefits">distinguishes itself from other DOI registration agencies</a> by providing this richer infrastructure which allows for things like funding information, license information, links between data and preprints, and so on—all contributing to the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus---better-research-through-better-metadata">research nexus</a> for everyone’s benefit.</p>
<p>Membership of Crossref is not just about getting a persistent identifier for your content, it’s about placing your content in context by providing as much metadata as possible and looking after it long-term.</p>
<p>Here’s a sneak preview of what the report will look like:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/springer-nature-prep.jpg" alt="Crossref participation report - Springer Nature" width="100%" /></p>
<p>So whether you’re a member who wants to run a “health check” on your own metadata, or a consumer of metadata interested in what’s available and from whom, watch this space for Participation Reports!</p>
<h3 id="would-you-like-a-heads-up-on-your-report-pre-beta">Would you like a heads-up on your report, pre-beta?</h3>
<p>Beta will be released some time in May or June this year, following acceptance testing with members and others. Then we’re looking for about 20 members to have a half-hour phone call with a walk-through ‘health check’. Please <a href="mailto:annat@crossref.org">contact Anna if you’d like to schedule one</a>.</p>Redirecting redirectionhttps://www.crossref.org/blog/redirecting-redirection/
Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000Geoffrey Bilderhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/redirecting-redirection/<p>Crossref has decided to change the HTTP redirect code used by our DOIs from <code>303</code> back to the more commonly used <code>302</code>. Our implementation of 303 redirects back in 2010 was based on recommended best practice for supporting linked data identifiers. Unfortunately, very few other parties have adopted this practice.</p>
<p>What’s more, because using a 303 redirect is still unusual, it tends to throw <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization">SEO</a> tools into a <a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/tizzy?s=t">tizzy</a>- and we spend a lot of time fielding SEO questions from our members about our use of 303s.</p>
<h2 id="a-name-tldr-a-tl-dr-a"><a name="tldr"></a>TL;DR</a></h2>
<p>At this point, we need to emphasise that we have never seen our use of 303s actually affect page rankings. But at the same time, use of 303 redirects has not had wider uptake. Maintaining this quixotic behaviour just isn’t worth the effort. We hope that, in the future, we can use other techniques (e.g. <a href="https://signposting.org/">signposting</a> &amp; <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vandesompel-citeas/">cite-as</a>) to achieve some of the things that 303 was supposed to do.</p>
<p>Note that these changes <strong>will not affect users or machines using DOIs</strong>. The change should be entirely transparent.</p>
<p>Below we provide some background to our decision and after that we provide some detailed technical notes from <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7694-8250">Jonathan Rees</a> and <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5490-1347">Henry Thompson</a> who have been very kind in helping to provide Crossref technical guidance on how we can help DOIs best support linked open data and adhere to HTTP best practice.</p>
<h2 id="a-name-background-background-a"><a name="background">Background</a></h2>
<p>Back in 2010, Crossref, DataCite (and later, several other RAs) responded to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/doi-what-do-we-got/">concerns that DOIs were not &ldquo;linked-data friendly.&rdquo;</a> There were three problems with DOIs at that time:</p>
<ol>
<li>It was not clear that DOIs could be used and expressed as HTTP URIs.</li>
<li>There was no standard way to ask a DOI to return a machine-readable representation of the data.</li>
<li>It wasn’t always clear if the DOI resolved to &ldquo;the thing&rdquo; (e.g. an article) or “something about the thing” (e.g. a landing page).</li>
</ol>
<p>On the advice of several people in the linked data community, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/dois-and-linked-data-some-concrete-proposals/">we proposed some options for fixing this</a>. And we finally settled on:</p>
<ol>
<li>Recommending that Crossref DOIs be expressed and displayed as HTTP (<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines/">now HTTPS</a>) URIs. This made it clear that DOIs could be used with HTTP applications.</li>
<li>Enabling DOI registration agencies to support content negotiation. This allowed RAs to support providing machine-readable representations of the data associated with a DOI.</li>
<li>Changing the underlying redirect code from the normal 302 to 303. This was designed to clarify what, at the time, was true- that most DOIs resolved to a landing page, not the article itself.</li>
</ol>
<p>By any practical measure, machine use of DOIs has exploded since we made these decisions back in 2010. Crossref’s APIs and content negotiation handle over 800 million requests for machine readable data a month. Our sibling organisation, <a href="https://www.datacite.org">DataCite</a>, has also seen a huge growth in machine use of DOIs. Many applications, from bibliographic management tools, to authoring systems and CRIS systems, make use of machine actionable DOIs all the time. So clearly our work to promote DOIs as machine actionable identifiers is working, but we are certain that our current use of 303 redirects has nothing to do with this growth.</p>
<p>First of all, as we said, very few parties have actually subscribed to the notion of using 303s to help distinguish &ldquo;the thing&rdquo; from “something about the thing”.</p>
<p>Secondly, even if they did try to rely on 303s to make this distinction, they would quickly get confused because the DOI is so often just the first in a chain of redirects which do not implement the same semantic distinction. At this point we should be clear - Crossref thinks these kinds of long redirect chains are a bad idea for two main reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>They slow down resolution.</li>
<li>They increase the number of potential failure points between the DOI and the item it resolves to.</li>
</ul>
<p>But we also cannot legislate them away. They exist. And in the real world you will find plenty of DOIs that do a 303 redirect to a system that, in turn, does a 302 redirect to a system that does a 301 redirect and…eventually ends up someplace returning a 200. You get the picture. How on earth is a machine supposed to interpret a 303-&gt;302-&gt;301-&gt;302 redirect chain?</p>
<p>Furthermore - nowadays, after following this chain of redirects, you will often find yourself on a &ldquo;page&rdquo; that is <em>both</em> a landing page <em>and</em> the article itself. Dynamic, one-page applications can simply morph the one into the other without the use of additional HTTP requests.</p>
<p>In other words, using 303s is not helping machines interpret what the DOI is pointing at. And yet, people seem to be making good use of machine actionable DOIs and they are not complaining much about it.</p>
<p>Personally, I’d might have just been happy to switch back to using 302s <em>simply</em> so that I could cut down on my conversations with SEO hacks. But that wouldn’t be a principled approach. In 2010 we spent a lot of time considering the initial switch to 303s- we needed to consult with the LOD community on a potential switch back to 302s. At the January 2018 <a href="https://pidapalooza.org/">PIDapalooza</a> I had a chance to talk to Henry Thomson about the 302/303 dilemma we faced, and he along with Jonathan Rees very generously provided the following feedback.</p>
<h2 id="a-name-details-best-practices-for-http-redirection-by-persistent-identifier-resolvers-302-vs-303-a"><a name="details">Best practices for HTTP redirection by persistent identifier resolvers: 302 vs. 303</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Jonathan Rees (MIT CSAIL, <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7694-8250">https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7694-8250</a>)</li>
<li>Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5490-1347">https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5490-1347</a>)</li>
</ul>
<p>If one goes to the trouble to organize an identifier system, then the desire that such a system should last as long as possible leads one to aspirationally say it’s a <em>persistent</em> identifier (PID) system. The unwillingness of the major browser suppliers to implement new URI schemes for PIDs initially hindered their use on the Web and this in turn inhibited widespread adoption. More recently a number of PID approaches have enjoyed very rapid growth as a result of a compromise: these PIDs participate in the World Wide Web by defining simple conversion rules mapping identifiers to <em>actionable</em> (&lsquo;http:&rsquo; and/or &lsquo;https:&lsquo;) forms and providing resolution servers that redirect requests for such forms to the appropriate destination.This approach has been widely adopted and is very successful, because it is so useful. An identifier’s actionable form leads, via the HTTP protocol and one or more redirections, to a web page that bears on the ground identity of the associated entity – or perhaps even directly to the entity itself, if the system is one for document entities that are naturally provided as web pages. The nature of the retrieved web page varies from one system to the next.</p>
<p>A confusion arose, however, over claims in various technical specifications (<a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986">URIs</a>, <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616">HTTP</a>, <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/">Web Architecture</a>) that the normal case is for the protocol to yield a &ldquo;representation&rdquo; of the “resource” “identified” by the URI. None of these terms is adequately defined by the specifications, and initially the language was not taken as normative. Those deploying identifier systems took the HTTP “resource” to be the entity associated with an identifier, and understood the “resource” as being “identified” by the URI, but it was never clear what was, or wasn’t, a “representation” of a given entity/resource: a description of the resource, the resource itself, a version of the resource, instructions on how to find the resource, etc. Sixteen years ago, in an attempt to clarify the intent of this part of the theory of URIs, and to allow applications to usefully and uniformly exploit the idea that an HTTP 200 response must deliver a “representation” of the “resource”, Tim Berners-Lee <a href="https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Mar/0092">asked</a> the <a href="https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/">W3C Technical Architecture Group</a> to consider what came to be known as the <a href="https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/14">httpRange-14</a> issue. It’s now 13 years after the TAG gave <a href="https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Jun/0039.html">advice</a> which almost no one was happy with, and 5 years after work on issue <a href="https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/57">httpRedirections-57</a> (which superseded httpRange-14) ground to a halt. There’s still no consensus on whether it’s OK to return landing pages with a 200 status in response to requests for pictures or publications, but the Web seems to be working nonetheless, and no one seems to be bothered much anymore.</p>
<p>The provision of HTTP-based resolution services has stimulated widespread support for the use of identifier systems with Web resolution, particularly in the scholarly journal publication context. Those setting up HTTP resolvers responsible for identifier systems must decide which HTTP response code should be used. The TAG’s advice sows doubt on the use of the 200 response code when the response would have been a landing page, and many resolvers avoid 200 regardless and use redirection for administrative purposes, for example</p>
<p>‘<a href="https://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1109/5.771073">https://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1109/5.771073</a>’ to</p>
<p>‘<a href="http://0-ieeexplore.ieee.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/document/771073/?reload=true">http://0-ieeexplore.ieee.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/document/771073/?reload=true</a>’ for the DOI</p>
<p>‘10.1109/5.771073’, or ‘<a href="https://identifiers.org/uniprot/A0A022YWF9">https://identifiers.org/uniprot/A0A022YWF9</a>’ to</p>
<p>‘<a href="http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/A0A022YWF9">http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/A0A022YWF9</a>’ for the Uniprot identifier</p>
<p>‘A0A022YWF9’.</p>
<p>So the response should be a redirection, but what kind, 301, 302, or 303? (Or 307, which is almost the same as 302.) A 301 redirect seems to say that the URI is not persistent (since its target is deemed &ldquo;more persistent&rdquo;). A 302 redirect seems to say that the response could have come via a 200, and so suffers the same fate as 200. That leaves 303, as hinted at in the TAG’s advice. This idea got some traction: Ten years ago a Semantic Web interest group promoted the TAG’s advice in <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/">a published note</a>, and seven years ago one of us wrote a <a href="https://odontomachus.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/crossrefs-gift-of-metadata/">blog post</a> giving the same advice for resolvers for PIDs in publishing.</p>
<p>However, not only is there neither consensus nor general utility around this strict understanding of the use of the various response codes – that is, that resolution to a landing page is inconsistent with a 200 (and <em>a posteriori</em> therefore with a 302) – but also the range of usage patterns for redirection of HTTP requests has grown and ramified over time as the Web has grown and become more complex. It’s on the face of it unlikely that a mere three response codes can capture all the resulting complexity or cover the space of outcomes (in terms of e.g. what ends up in the browser address bar or what search engines index a page under) that a page owner might like to signal.</p>
<p>We find in practice that some PID redirections <em>are</em> ending up (usually after further publisher-local redirects) at the &ldquo;identified&rdquo; document, some at landing pages, and some at one <em>or</em> the other depending on the requesting site, for example in the case of paywalled material.</p>
<p>In the absence of a rethinking of the whole 3xx space, it seems to us that only the 301 vs. 302 distinct ion (roughly, 301 = permanent = please fix the link, and 302 = temporary = don’t change the link) is well understood and more or less consistently treated, whereas for 303, web servers are not very consistent and both <a href="http://sharkseo.com/nohat/303-redirects-seo/">search engine</a> and citation crawler behaviours are at best inconsistent and at worst downright unhelpful.</p>
<p>So, we believe it is in both users’ and publishers’ interests for resolvers of actionable-form PIDs to use 302 redirects, not 303.</p>
<p>If we want to help machines better understand the resource that a DOI points at, we have to explore using more nuanced mechanisms.</p>
<p>Just using 302 for the first redirect doesn&rsquo;t do everything necessary to effectively support the emerging PID+redirection architecture. It&rsquo;s at the <em>end</em> of the redirect chains that we need more: a standardised way to find the PID back at the start of the chain. The <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vandesompel-citeas/">&lsquo;cite-as&rsquo; proposal</a> does exactly this, and we hope it&rsquo;s quickly approved and widely adopted. Once <em>that</em> happens a proposal for augmenting browser (and API) behaviour to prefer, or at least offer, the &lsquo;cite-as&rsquo; link for bookmarking and copying will be needed.</p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 8 (with Researchfish)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-8-with-researchfish/
Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-8-with-researchfish/<p>Continuing our <a href="https://crossref.org/categories/api-case-study/">blog series</a> highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Gavin Reddick, Chief Analyst at <a href="https://www.researchfish.net/">Researchfish</a> about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.</p>
<h3 id="introducing-researchfish">Introducing Researchfish</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.researchfish.net/">Researchfish</a> is the world’s leading platform for the reporting of the outputs, outcomes and impacts of funded research. It is used by over 100 funding organisations in Europe, North America and Australasia and currently tracks around €50 billion of funding, across 125,000 grants. Researchers have reported around 2.5 million attributed outcomes in Researchfish and roughly half of these are publications with the other half being collaborations, further funding, data sets, policy influences, engagement activities etc.</p>
<p>Funders use Researchfish to ask grantees to report on the outcomes of their grant and Researchfish makes it easy for researchers to do this in a structured way. Researchfish seeks to improve the quality and robustness of the evidence base available for evaluation. It works with funders, research organisations and researchers to present, explain and evaluate the impact of research across all disciplines and a wide range of output types.</p>
<h3 id="how-is-the-crossref-rest-api-used-in-researchfish">How is the Crossref REST API used in Researchfish?</h3>
<ol>
<li><p>Search<br>
As publications are a major output of research it is important to make the reporting of those publications be as easy as possible and quality of the information on those publications as high as possible. Researchfish integrates with a number of publication APIs, including Crossref, which enables users to enter a number of DOIs or search by author, title, etc. to find their publication.</p></li>
<li><p>Direct Harvest<br>
Researchfish uses funding acknowledgements in the Crossref metadata to add publications to researchers’ portfolios and report the publications as arising from the grant. If the acknowledgement exists it’s important to use it instead of asking researchers to report the same thing twice.</p></li>
<li><p>Interoperability<br>
Research organisations can upload publications to Researchfish on behalf of researchers, re-using information from their local systems. We use the Crossref REST API to validate the data provided by universities before uploading.</p></li>
<li><p>Metadata Enrichment – Open Access<br>
We use the license and embargo period information in the Crossref metadata to help understand the open access status of publications and whether they meet any policy requirements, without researchers having to take any steps to report in this complex area.</p></li>
<li><p>Metadata Enrichment – Normalisation/deduplication<br>
As Researchfish allows users to add information from lots of different sources it is very important to normalise the data and prevent the same publication being reported multiple times in different ways. We use the Crossref REST API as part of this process.</p></li>
</ol>
<h3 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-researchfish">What are the future plans for Researchfish?</h3>
<p>We are looking to expand the range of integrations to support non-publication outputs and allow some of the same functionality that we have built for publications. We already have integrations to support the reporting of patents, collaborations, further funding and next destinations but are looking to enhance these, along with expanding links to data sets, clinical trials, software and spin out companies.</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-researchfish-like-to-see-in-crossref">What else would Researchfish like to see in Crossref?</h3>
<p>Crossref is an excellent resource and most of our wish list would be to see more uptake of existing fields e.g. retractions and the ability to use them more flexibly in the REST API. We would also like to see a little more consistency in some of the metadata – publication type is the area that seems to cause the most confusion, particularly around conference proceedings and clinical trials.</p>
<hr />
<p>Thank you Researchfish! If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>PIDs for conferences - your comments are welcome!https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/pids-for-conferences-your-comments-are-welcome/
Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000Aliaksandr Birukouhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/pids-for-conferences-your-comments-are-welcome/<p><em>Aliaksandr Birukou is the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature and is chair of the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/conferences-projects/">Project PID Group</a> that has been working to establish a persistent identifier system and registry for scholarly conferences. Here Alex provides some background to the work and asks for input from the community:</em></p>
<p>Roughly one year ago, Crossref and DataCite <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/taking-the-con-out-of-conferences">started</a> a working group on conference and project identifiers. With this blog post, we would like to share the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1URIvkUpzcfjSd2YFIS-rdRIrOyrKSbFfhkdpGPRTAFI/edit">specification</a> of conference metadata and Crossmark for proceedings and are inviting the broader community to comment.</p>
<h3 id="why-are-conferences-important">Why are conferences important?</h3>
<p>One common misbelief is that most published research appears in journals. However, next to new ways of communication research results (blogs, presentations,…) and journals there are also other publication options, like books, very important in humanities, or conference proceedings, which are very important in computer science and a couple of related disciplines. Conference proceedings are collections of journal-like papers, often undergoing a more competitive peer review process than in journals. For instance, looking at original research in computer science in Scopus published in CS in 2012-2016, 63% of articles appeared in proceedings, while only 37% were published in journals. <a href="http://dblp.uni-trier.de/statistics/distributionofpublicationtype">DBLP</a>, one of the most important indexing services in CS, lists more than two million conference papers organized in ~5,400 conference series.</p>
<p>So, while it is true that CS has a significant share of conference proceedings, conferences are also relevant in many other disciplines which do not publish formal proceedings. For instance, <a href="http://inspirehep.net/">inSPIRE</a> contains ~23,000 conferences in high-energy physics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) publishes roughly 100 <a href="http://0-proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/conferenceproceedings.aspx">proceedings</a> volumes annually.</p>
<h3 id="why-do-we-need-an-open-persistent-id-for-a-conference-or-a-conference-series">Why do we need an open persistent ID for a conference or a conference series?</h3>
<p>With publishers, learned societies, indexing services, libraries, conference management systems, research evaluation and funding agencies using conferences directly or indirectly in their daily work, a common vocabulary would simplify data processing, reporting and minimize errors. Right now, a publisher assigns a unique conference ID to the conference to be published, then an indexing service does it, then it is assigned in a library. Wouldn&rsquo;t it be easier to do this at the very beginning of the process, when the conference planning starts, and keep the same identifier through the whole conference lifecycle?</p>
<p>The joint Crossref and DataCite group on conference and project identifiers has discussed this topic at half a dozen calls and various PID community meetings (PIDapalooza, FORCE conferences, AAHEP Information Provider Summit). The result of those discussions is a draft of the specification of conference metadata and Crossmark for proceedings.</p>
<p>The document first defines the concepts of a conference, conference series, joint and co-located conferences. It then introduces the information we want to store about those entities, e.g., the ID, name, acronym, other IDs, URL and the maintainer of the conference series, or the ID, conf series ID, number, dates, location, and URL for conferences. Such metadata can be submitted to Crossref and DataCite by conference organizers or publishers on their behalf and linked to the existing proceedings metadata, where appropriate. It can be then used for linking research outputs from a conference (beyond formal proceedings), recognizing reviewers via services such as ORCID and Publons, computing metrics of a conference series, conference disambiguation in indexing services and ratings (CORE, QUALIS, CCF), and so on.</p>
<p>The second part of the document introduces Crossmark for conference proceedings. Its goal is to structure and preserve the information about the peer review process of a conference as declared by the general or program chairs. Depending on how much information is available from the conference organizers, one can use the basic or extended versions of Crossmark.</p>
<p>In order to comment, please open the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1URIvkUpzcfjSd2YFIS-rdRIrOyrKSbFfhkdpGPRTAFI/edit">specification</a> and leave comments using “comment” feature of Google Docs. The draft remains open for comments till the <strong>31st of May 2018</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="next-steps">Next steps</h3>
<p>After hearing from YOU, we will update the document to reflect the community comments. In parallel, we start a subgroup discussing the governance models, looking into whether we need a new membership category at Crossref, what fees should be covered, etc.</p>
<hr />Do you want to be on our Board?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/do-you-want-to-be-on-our-board/
Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/do-you-want-to-be-on-our-board/<blockquote>
<p>Do you want to effect change for the scholarly community?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2018 election.</p>
<p>The key responsibilities of the Board are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Setting the strategic direction for the organization;</li>
<li>Providing financial oversight; and</li>
<li>Approving new policies and services.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="some-of-the-decisions-the-board-has-made-in-recent-years-include">Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Introduction of the Metadata APIs Plus service (to provide a paid-for premium service for machine access to metadata);</li>
<li>Updating the policy on open references (to increase links so that more readers can access content);</li>
<li>Establishing <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-oi-project-gets-underway-planning-an-open-organization-identifier-registry/">the OI Project</a> (to create a persistent Organization Identifier);</li>
<li>Inclusion of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/news/2016-11-02-crossref-now-accepts-preprints/">preprints in the Crossref metadata</a>; and</li>
<li>Approval to develop <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a> (which will track online activity from multiple sources).</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-is-expected-of-a-crossref-board-member">What is expected of a Crossref Board member?</h3>
<p>Board members should be able to attend all board meetings, which occur three times a year in different parts of the world. If you are unable to attend in person you must be able to attend via telephone.</p>
<p>Board members must:</p>
<ul>
<li>be familiar with the three key responsibilities listed above,</li>
<li>actively participate and contribute towards discussions, and</li>
<li>read the board documents and materials provided, prior to attending meetings.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="how-to-submit-an-expression-of-interest-to-serve-on-the-board">How to submit an expression of interest to serve on the Board</h3>
<p>We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you.</p>
<p>If you are a Crossref member, are <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/are-you-having-an-identity-crisis/">eligible to vote</a>, and would like to be considered, you should complete and submit the <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1AaPqLz4jBUeZ-VggkvRHBSYfwadrwfT2FP6YGcbyb48/edit">expression of interest</a> form with both your organization&rsquo;s statement and your personal statement before 18 May 2018.</p>
<p>It is important to note it is your organization who is the Crossref member—and therefore the seat will belong to your organization.</p>
<h3 id="about-the-election-and-our-board">About the election and our Board</h3>
<p>We have a principle of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/truths/">“one member, one vote”</a>; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are five seats up for election in 2018.</p>
<p>The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/">View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions).</a></p>
<p>The election opens online in September 2018 and voting is done by proxy online, or in person, at the annual business meeting during ‘Crossref LIVE18’ on 13th November 2018 in Toronto, Canada. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in September 2018.</p>
<h3 id="the-role-of-the-nominating-committee">The role of the Nominating Committee</h3>
<p>The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Nominating Committee is charged with selecting a slate of candidates for election from those who have expressed an interest.</p>
<p>The selection of the slate (which is likely to exceed the number of open seats) is based on the quality of the expressions of interest and maintaining the balance and diversity of the board—especially in areas of organizational size, gender, geography and sector.</p>
<p>The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members. The current Nominating Committee members are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Mark Patterson, eLife (Chair);</li>
<li>Chris Shillum, Elsevier;</li>
<li>Amy Brand, MIT Press;</li>
<li>Vincent Cassidy, The Institution of Engineering &amp; Technology (IET); and</li>
<li>Claire Moulton, The Company of Biologists.</li>
</ul>
<p>Our board needs to be stay truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organizations who publish. Please <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1AaPqLz4jBUeZ-VggkvRHBSYfwadrwfT2FP6YGcbyb48/edit">submit your statements of interest</a> or reply to me with any questions to me at lhart@crossref.org.</p>Hear this, real insight into the inner workings of Crossrefhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/hear-this-real-insight-into-the-inner-workings-of-crossref/
Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000Joe Wasshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/hear-this-real-insight-into-the-inner-workings-of-crossref/
<h2 id="you-want-to-hear-more-from-us-we-hear-you">You want to hear more from us. We hear you.</h2>
<p>We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.</p>
<p>We asked a focus group “<strong>What one thing would you change?</strong>”. In hindsight, we could have done a better job with the question. We did get some enlightening answers but&mdash;for legal and practical reasons&mdash;we are unable to end either world hunger or global conflict, or do any of the other things we were invited to do. So we went back to our focus group and asked “What one thing would you change <em>about Crossref</em>?”.</p>
<p>The answers were illuminating. Some of you wanted mundane things like more data dumps. A disappointing number of people wanted us to put the capital ‘R’ back in our name. But two things we heard consistently, loud and clear, were:</p>
<ol>
<li>“I want to hear more from Crossref”</li>
<li>“I want to know more about what’s going on inside Crossref”</li>
</ol>
<p>One respondent said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I like the newsletters, and the Twitter visuals are nice enough, but I want to hear, you know, <em>more</em> from them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Crossref is your typical quiet DOI Registration Agency. They make a big thing about being the background infrastructure you don’t notice. But infrastructure doesn’t have to be quiet. I live next to the M25, and I can tell you, that’s the sound of success. I mean, it’s loud.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One final quote which clinched it for us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The outreach team is doing a great job with their multilingual videos. But you can never cover every world language. In today’s connected world, you should be thinking about the <em>universal language</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She clarified:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No, I don’t mean XML.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We took this advice to heart. When we were building Crossref Event Data, we baked these features right in. Now you can hear what’s going on inside Crossref, any time, day or night.</p>
<h2 id="introducing-the-crossref-thing-action-service">Introducing the Crossref Thing Action Service!</h2>
<p>Turn up your speakers (about half-way, it would be foolhardy to turn them too high) and visit:</p>
<h3 id="live-eventdata-crossref-org-thing-action-service-html-https-live-eventdata-crossref-org-thing-action-service-html"><a href="https://0-live-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/thing-action-service.html">live.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action-service.html</a></h3>
<p>It’s optimized for Google Chrome, but we’ve tested it in Firefox and Safari.</p>
<p>The <strong>Thing Action Service</strong> shows you, in excruciating sonorous detail, every single action that happens inside the Crossref Event Data system. Every time we receive live data from Twitter or Wikipedia. Every time we check a DOI. Every time we check an RSS feed. Every time we find a link to our Registered Content on the web.</p>
<p>In a pioneering move within the scholarly publishing space, you can hear the data as it’s being processed, live. Furthermore, we think we are the first DOI Registration Agency to offer our services in stereo.</p>
<p>John Chodacki, Professional Working Group Chair, said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We welcome this innovation. From my experience Chairing, well, everything, I’m certain that hearing-impaired users will like it especially.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So sit back, put the Thing Action Service on the speakers, and relax. You may find it difficult at first, but as you let the sound waves wash over you, think of all that data in flight. That beep could be someone criticizing the article you wrote on Twitter. But don’t worry, the next one might be someone defending it.</p>
<p>Think of it as <em>musique concrète</em>. That’s the Art of Persistence.</p>
Hello, meet Event Data Version 1, and new Product Managerhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/hello-meet-event-data-version-1-and-new-product-manager/
Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Buskehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/hello-meet-event-data-version-1-and-new-product-manager/<p>I joined Crossref only a few weeks ago, and have happily thrown myself into the world of Event Data as the service’s new product manager. In my first week, a lot of time was spent discussing the ins and outs of Event Data. This learning process made me very much feel like you might when you’ve just bought a house, and you’re studying the blueprints while also planning the house-warming party.</p>
<p>If Event Data is like a house, it’s been built and we’ve recently been putting on a last coat of paint. We’re very happy to announce version 1 of the API today. This is bringing us closer to the launch (house warming party), which will officially present Event Data to the world. Further to that analogy, while I bought into the house, I wasn’t around to see it being built. That’s both incredibly exciting and a little daunting.</p>
<p>Version 1 contains fixes for some challenges we came up against. Like scalability, data modeling for Wikipedia, and polishing. Version 1 is a new release of the data, but it is the same data set you already know and love. It should solve some of the recent stability issues, for which we apologize.</p>
<p>Moving forward, we expect the data model in V1 to persist and are not planning to make further large scale, fundamental changes to the Event Data API. As such, the version 1 release of the API is exceptional and a big step forward. It is important that we address these fixes before we go into production as it affects everyone who uses the service.</p>
<h2 id="same-event-data-new-address">Same Event Data, new address</h2>
<p>In setting up for the upcoming production service rollout, we have updated the Event Data API domain so that it is in line with Crossref’s suite of APIs. The Query API can now be found at a new URL. Here is an example query: <a href="https://0-api-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/events?rows=1">https://0-api-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/events?rows=1</a></p>
<p>We have also simplified the standard query parameters in favor of a cleaner filter syntax.</p>
<p>Lastly, we have added a new “Mailto” parameter, <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc#etiquette">just like in our REST API</a>. It is encouraged but optional, so you are not obliged to supply it. We&rsquo;ll only use it to contact you if there&rsquo;s a problem.</p>
<h2 id="changes-to-the-wikipedia-data-structure">Changes to the Wikipedia data structure</h2>
<p>We’ve done a lot of work to use the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/data/ids-and-urls/">canonical URLs</a> for web pages to represent content as consistently as possible. This has entailed updating previously collected Events across data sources. As such, we’ve updated our Wikipedia data model to align with this. Because this update has impacted every Wikipedia Event in the system, we recommend those who have used or saved existing data from the deprecated Query API version to pull a new copy of the data. Read more about <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crossref-event-data-beta-testers/-RAzhr7SIHY">the rationale for changing the Wikipedia data model</a>.</p>
<h2 id="updated-data">Updated data</h2>
<p>This then brings me to how we now handle updated data. Sometimes we edit Events to add new features, or we may edit Events if there is an issue processing and/or representing the data when we provision it to the community. And sometimes we must remove Events to comply with a particular data source’s terms and conditions (ex: deleted Tweets). You can read about how updates work in <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/data/updates/">the user guide</a>.</p>
<p>To make life easier moving forward, we’ve split updated Events into two API endpoints.
If you are already using Event Data, you will need to make some small updates to your client(s) to align with this. The new endpoints are further described <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/service/query-api/">in the documentation</a>.</p>
<h2 id="event-data-beta-group">Event Data beta group</h2>
<p>With the version 1 release we are making solid progress towards an official launch (the house-warming party!), we are quite excited to <a href="mailto:eventdata@crossref.org">hear how you are using Event Data</a>. Please consider <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/crossref-event-data-beta-testers">joining our beta group</a>, if you are using the Event Data API or want to hear about updates.</p>
<p>This is also where you can <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crossref-event-data-beta-testers/2fak5d1UMag">read about these updates in more detail</a>.</p>
<p>For more information and to get started with Crossref Event Data, please refer to <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/index.html">the user guide</a>.</p>
<p>I am looking forward to seeing how Event Data is being used, and working with the community to continuously improve what we can offer through this service. Feedback is always welcome, feel free to get in touch with me at eventdata@crossref.org.</p>A Lustrum over the weekendhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-lustrum-over-the-weekend/
Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-lustrum-over-the-weekend/<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/lustrum2.png" alt="image and meaning of lustrum" width="350px" />
</p>
The ancient Romans performed a purification rite (“lustration”) after taking a census every five years. The term [“lustrum”]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustrum) designated not only the animal sacrifice (“suovetaurilia”) but was also applied to the period of time itself. At Crossref, we’re not exactly in the business of sacrificial rituals. But over the weekend I thought it would be fun to dive into the metadata and look at very high level changes during this period of time.
Crossref provides the [latest cumulative stats online](/dashboard). We share news about the work we do along the way in the [Crossref blog] (https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog), including periodic summaries such as the [Executive Director’s 2017 end-of-year highlights](/blog/a-year-in-the-life-of-crossref) and the [annual review](/annual-report). But what follows is a brief and very informal survey of the population of inhabitants in the Crossref metadata-land for the current lustrum.
### Works published
The first thing a census typically asks is population size. We know there are new records arriving each month with 95.7mil to date. And they do so at variable rates. But when the data is visualized, a rough yearly pattern emerges into view. (Data were collected on Mar 25, 2018; results are partial for this month.)
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Jen blog chart.png" alt="works published by month" height="400px" width="650px" />
</p>
Each year brings with it a significant spike, an influx of new entrants, perhaps reflecting an increase in submissions at the end of the previous year. After January, volume drops down dramatically and gradually rises once more over the course of the year. We see smaller spikes at the March, June, and September mark. (Since this was a brief exercise, I did not dive into any formal research conducted on the nature of publishing cycles.)
### Metadata Coverage
The next question is a look at how the population is broken up into different demographics. For this, I analyzed four key sub-populations of ORCID, funding information, license, abstract metadata. The following graph shows the percentage of new parties (i.e., works registered at Crossref containing these metadata) across four specific segments.
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/metadata coverage.png" alt="Crossref metadata coverage" height="750px" width="650px" />
</p>
I ran [Karthik Ram’s script](https://gist.github.com/karthik/7e7875af0ecaa4327d3d61f550de94e0) which employed [rOpenSci’s r client](https://github.com/ropensci/rcrossref) for the [Crossref REST API](https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/). Data are based on publication date rather than deposit date and represent all updates to the metadata record for the baseline view.
The census graph shows extensive empty space on the top half, indicating there is ample room for continual growth in these communities. The ORCID population is expanding the fastest, followed by license and funding. Abstracts are a minority group and quite visibly needs a population boost here in Crossref-land.
This view does not capture the percentages across content types nor does it take into account the differential rate of growth between content types (e.g., journal article, book, report, conference proceeding, dissertation, dataset, component, posted content, peer review) as the Crossref corpus has grown. While ORCID, funding, and license information are available for all full content types (viz., excludes components), this matters for abstracts. Abstracts are part of the metadata schema of all relevant content types. This excludes those which do not apply: dataset, component, and peer reviews. All things considered though, the relative impact on the total percentage of metadata deposited (or not deposited) is miniscule given the small sums for these works.
### Calling the real demographers & cartographers
This mini-pseudo-lustrum was the result of a few hours of play. The graphs have raised more questions than answers. We welcome more serious and earnest efforts to dive into the metadata and conduct a more detailed, reliable investigation on the size, distribution and composition of the population through our [REST API](http://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc). Next month, we will roll out reports on metadata coverage based on individual members.
This “play” census came out of a session with Karthik Ram, one of the founders of [rOpenSci](https://ropensci.org/), as we talked about struggle to build better tools for researchers. (rOpenSci is an exciting and influential non-profit that builds open source software for research with a community of users and developers and educates scientists about transparent research practices.) With each round of cocktails, it became clear that a critical subset of the issues boiled down to the problem of limited information about research publications. Why, that is what Crossref does! Indeed. Publishers register their content with Crossref and provide the metadata about the works they publish.
Over the past few years, we have been working with our members to broaden the coverage of the metadata as well as improve their metadata quality. This issue is not exclusive to Crossref - [Metadata 2020](http://www.metadata2020.org/) rallies stakeholders across the research enterprise to push for change together.
To represent the full breadth and depth of the scholarly communications enterprise, Crossref aims to capture the richness of what our members publish through the content they register. So publishers, powerfully represent your services and make sure [your metadata is complete and correct](/services/content-registration/) for discovery systems, indexing platforms, research evaluation systems, analytics tools, and the great number of Crossref metadata consumers far and wide.
</div>
How we use Crossref metadatahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-we-use-crossref-metadata/
Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-we-use-crossref-metadata/<p>Bruce Rosenblum, CEO, Inera Incorporated talks about the work they are doing at Inera, and how they’re using our metadata as part of their workflow.</p>
<h3 id="can-you-tell-us-little-bit-about-inera-and-yourself">Can you tell us little bit about Inera, and yourself</h3>
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<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Bruce.jpg" alt=“Bruce Rosenblum CEO Inera" height="250px" width="250px" class="img-responsive" />
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<p>I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of publishing and technology. At Inera I help scholarly and technical publishers improve their workflows through technology, and build editorial and XML software solutions to improve the publication workflow. I lead the development teams for our eXtyles and Edifix products, and I also participate in community projects: co-authoring the original NLM DTD suite, developing the Crossref Metadata Deposit Schema in 2001, and serving for 8 years on the NISO board. I continue to work on JATS and BITS development, and I co-chair the NISO STS Working Group. Before joining Inera, I developed publishing technology such as an Apple II Word processor for Chinese in 1981, and early micro-computer desktop publishing systems in the late 1980s.</p>
<p>At Inera, we develop and license the eXtyles family of Word-based editorial and XML software tools (including eXtyles, eXtyles NLM, eXtyles STS, and eXtyles SI) as well as Edifix, an online bibliographic reference solution. eXtyles and Edifix allow users to automate the most time-consuming aspects of document publication. Publishers of scholarly journals and books, standards, and government documents around the world rely on our software solutions to drive efficient, effective publishing workflows.</p>
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<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Inera.png" alt=“Inera logo" height="200px" width="250px" class="img-responsive" />
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<p>Inera and Crossref have collaborated since 2001, and we jointly won the <a href="https://www.nepcoawards.com/2014-winner-videos.html">2014 NEPCo Award</a> for the ongoing symbiotic relationship between our organizations.</p>
<h3 id="what-problem-is-your-software-and-service-trying-to-solve">What problem is your software and service trying to solve?</h3>
<p>Publishers receive manuscripts from authors who have deep knowledge of their subject matter but are sometimes not expert writers and rarely expert users of Microsoft Word. Our eXtyles and Edifix solutions are designed to help publishers rapidly and accurately prepare these manuscripts for publication by automating a lot of technical and editorial cleanup, then producing high-quality JATS and BITS XML.</p>
<p>Within eXtyles and Edifix, we have sophisticated algorithms that heuristically parse bibliographic references, copyedit them automatically to a publisher’s editorial style, and then link them to Crossref and PubMed. These features eliminate a lot of repetitive detail copy editing work so that human editors can focus on higher-level editing tasks, and they produce more accurate bibliographies that include online links, with a fraction of the work that it would take to look up, check, and correct each reference manually.</p>
<h3 id="how-are-you-using-crossref-metadata-at-inera">How are you using Crossref Metadata at Inera?</h3>
<p>Simply stated, we use Crossref metadata in our products to ensure that bibliographic reference lists are as complete, correct, and up to date as possible at the point of publication.</p>
<p>Both eXtyles and Edifix use Crossref metadata to improve reference lists. Our reference processing module pulls apart references to journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, and standards, applies elements based on the JATS reference model, and then reconstructs them according to the editorial style chosen by the user (e.g., AMA, APA, MLA, or a custom-configured style to meet customers’ requirements).</p>
<p>Crossref metadata is used for two primary purposes. First, we query the Crossref database to obtain DOI links for journal articles, books, conferences, and other types of references. This link lookup helps our customers fulfill their Crossref membership obligations and helps ensure that researchers get appropriate credit for citations of their work. Second, we use the metadata obtained from Crossref to improve the accuracy of author-supplied reference entries.</p>
<h3 id="what-values-do-you-pull-from-our-apis">What values do you pull from our APIs?</h3>
<p>The most important metadata value we retrieve is the DOI itself. Because the majority of bibliographic references in author manuscripts do not include DOIs, a key feature of our service is DOI retrieval. However, we use metadata well beyond the DOIs once we’ve matched a record. Even if a reference already has a DOI, we still do a traditional query, using the other available reference elements, to retrieve a DOI and compare the results to flag discrepancies. We’ve found that ~20% of author-supplied DOIs are incorrect, so correcting these discrepancies is one of myriad ways that our software uses Crossref metadata to improve references before publication.</p>
<p>We also pull all of the other fields that are used to build a bibliographic reference—complete author list, title of the item, publication date, volume, pages, and so on—and use these elements to correct and improve the reference. By filling in missing data (e.g., volume, issue, and page numbers) and flagging discrepancies between author-supplied entries and Crossref metadata (e.g., author names in a different order, words missing or misspelled in an article or chapter title), our software assures publishers of a high-quality bibliography with minimal manual effort.</p>
<p>Finally, we use Crossmark metadata to flag references that may have been corrected—or retracted—to inform editors when an item may need further attention from an author. Did the author knowingly cite a retracted article? If not, does that change the science of the paper citing that retracted item?</p>
<h3 id="have-you-built-your-own-interface-to-extract-this-data">Have you built your own interface to extract this data?</h3>
<p>Yes, we’ve built our own tools to query Crossref’s APIs. In 2002, we used the old “piped-query” API to submit elements of journal references, but we outgrew this API because it returned too many false positive results and missed other DOIs that were correct, and because we wanted to query Crossref for DOIs to other reference types (e.g., books, conference papers, reports) as well as journals. We switched to XML queries in 2006, and the result was a huge improvement in the quality and quantity of DOI links for our customers.</p>
<p>But just moving to XML queries still wasn’t good enough. Eight years ago, we wanted to improve DOI retrieval of non-journal items like reports, and we found that the existing Crossref APIs didn’t provide what we needed. So we collaborated with Crossref CTO Chuck Koscher to create the author–title query as an extension to regular XML queries. The result was a dramatic improvement in our ability to retrieve DOIs to non-journal items. The author–title query was a precursor to Crossref’s current metadata APIs, and it continues to serve us well.</p>
<h3 id="how-often-do-you-extract-or-query-data">How often do you extract or query data?</h3>
<p>All the time! Our customers are located all around the world in more than 25 countries on six continents, so Crossref metadata queries from our software are happening continually, at any time of the day or night, seven days a week, and even on holidays.</p>
<p>There are two other important ways that our software interacts with Crossref APIs every day. First, Crossref’s <a href="https://0-apps-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/simpleTextQuery">Simple Text Query</a> (STQ) service, which is used by smaller publishers to meet their Crossref requirement to add DOIs to their reference lists, was built using Inera’s reference parsing engine. In this case, our software runs on Crossref’s servers and is an integral part of the Crossref ecosystem.</p>
<p>Second, to test our products, we run a comprehensive automated quality assurance process every night that tests all aspects of our software and ensures day-over-day stability. When we added Crossref linking functionality in 2003, we began running several thousand Crossref queries per night, looking for consistency in our software’s results. A few months later, we noted an unexpected change: a reference that had previously returned a DOI failed to link! We contacted Crossref about the “lost” DOI, and upon investigation, Crossref discovered that in the process of re-depositing 20,000 DOIs, the publisher had accidentally inverted author surnames and given names in all of those records.</p>
<p>Crossref immediately recognized the value of Inera’s automated testing, and its ability to unearth such errors, to Crossref and its members. Over time, the number of DOIs we test nightly has grown to tens of thousands, so we’ve worked with Crossref to develop an automated reporting and analysis process that makes detecting and resolving the issues highlighted by our internal testing more efficient.</p>
<p>The co-development of the author–title query API and the sharing of our nightly test suite results are just two examples that highlight the nature of the Inera–Crossref relationship: it’s characterized by technology integration, bidirectional information exchange, and innovative problem solving.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-inera">What are the future plans for Inera?</h3>
<p>We’re constantly working to improve eXtyles and Edifix and to develop new and innovative ways to help our customers. Here are a few examples:</p>
<p>Two years ago, at the peak of the Zika outbreak, we received an urgent request from the World Health Organization to help them deposit DOIs for articles that had been submitted but not yet peer reviewed (<a href="http://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/zika_open/en/">see Zika Open</a>). Within 16 hours of their request, we developed, tested, and deployed updated software that allowed WHO to publish information vital to researchers, including DOIs, within hours of receipt.</p>
<p>With respect to Crossref APIs, we plan to integrate the Crossref query features to retrieve DOIs for standards that are deposited by organizations like IEEE, ASTM, and BSI. We also plan to expand our linking and verification capabilities to incorporate newer reference types such as preprints and data citations.</p>
<p>More broadly, we’re very excited about the eXtyles Metadata Extraction technology we released last year. This technology can be used by online submission systems and preprint servers to automatically extract key metadata elements (title, abstract, authors, affiliations, keywords) from author-submitted manuscripts, no matter what “style” the author may have used to format the manuscript. This technology is already in-use at Aries Systems to simplify the submission process. We’re looking forward, soon, to seeing this technology used by preprint servers and institutional repositories to automate the collection and deposit of preprint metadata to Crossref.</p>New Board Chair Paul Peters shares our missionhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/new-board-chair-paul-peters-shares-our-mission/
Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/new-board-chair-paul-peters-shares-our-mission/<p>At the end of last year, Paul Peters&mdash;CEO of our member <em>Hindawi</em>&mdash;became the new Chair of the Crossref Board. The announcement was made in Singapore at our first LIVE Annual ever held in Asia. I caught up with Paul back in London, UK, where he answered a few questions about what he hopes to bring to the Board, and to the Crossref community as a whole.</p>
<h3 id="1-congratulations-paul-how-delighted-were-you-to-be-voted-in-by-your-fellow-board-members-old-and-new">1. Congratulations, Paul. How delighted were you to be voted in by your fellow board members, old and new?</h3>
<p>That’s a rather leading question ;-)</p>
<p>Seriously though, I am incredibly honored to have been chosen to lead Crossref’s board at such an important point in the organization’s development. The current composition of the board is as diverse as it has ever been, which is essential if the board is to represent Crossref’s global membership, as well as the wide range of business and publication models that our members use. This diversity on the board will help to support Crossref’s aim of encouraging innovation in scholarly communication by providing open infrastructure that benefits all researchers.</p>
<h3 id="2-you-ve-been-on-our-board-for-nine-years-how-has-it-changed-in-that-time-and-what-should-the-board-be-most-proud-of">2. You’ve been on our board for nine years. How has it changed in that time and what should the board be most proud of?</h3>
<p>When I first joined the board, Crossref was at the stage where you had successfully established persistent reference linking as a standard practice among scholarly journal publishers. And, although this was the original purpose of Crossref, it was by no means an easy task, as it required a diverse group of competing publishers to work together in building shared infrastructure for the common good.</p>
<p>In the nine years since then, I’ve seen Crossref continue to build on this core foundation of technological expertise, the trust and goodwill of its membership, and the diverse skills of its small staff. The result has been the development of important new services (such as Similarity Check) that have become an essential component of the scholarly communications system, support new content types (including both preprints and peer review reports) that are becoming increasingly important in the move towards an Open Science future, and the expansion of Crossref’s membership to include almost 10,000 members of all shapes and sizes from 114 countries around the world.</p>
<p>With regard to the board itself, I have been pleased to see Crossref undergo important changes that have provided greater transparency in the organization&rsquo;s governance, as well as more active participation from its members. Last year Crossref put out an open call to invite members to put themselves forward for consideration on the board. As a result of holding its first contested election, Crossref saw a dramatic increase in the engagement of members in the election process. Not only is this important for ensuring that the board is truly representative of the diverse membership, but it will also help to actively engage a larger pool of members in the important work that lies ahead.</p>
<h3 id="3-what-do-you-see-as-crossref-s-strengths-and-role">3. What do you see as Crossref’s strengths and role?</h3>
<p>I believe that Crossref’s past and future success relies on two key strengths. The first is its ability to bring together a large and disparate community of organizations and individuals to create tools and services that no single organization could develop alone. People sometimes overlook how successful Crossref has been in building the trust and support of a diverse group of stakeholders, however I believe this has been an essential ingredient in the organization’s success and will be essential as Crossref develops new tools and services in the years to come.</p>
<p>Crossref’s other core strength has been the expertise, passion, and ambitious vision of its staff, many of whom I have had the pleasure of knowing since my first days on the board. The ability to develop and maintain real-time infrastructure serving millions of end-users, while simultaneously developing new products and services, requires an incredible range of skills from technology and product development, to marketing, community outreach, and customer support. Moreover, as a growing non-profit organization with thousands of members around the world, and an international staff working across national boundaries, Crossref’s legal, financial, and administrative support team have also been an essential ingredient in the organization’s success.</p>
<h3 id="4-we-ve-grown-beyond-just-the-publisher-constituency-to-libraries-scholars-and-platforms-and-tools-which-constituencies-do-you-see-us-involving-next">4. We’ve grown beyond just the publisher constituency to libraries, scholars, and platforms and tools, which constituencies do you see us involving next?</h3>
<p>Over time I believe that Crossref’s constituency will grow to cover all organizations that contribute to the creation and dissemination of scholarly research, although I recognize this may take several years to achieve.</p>
<p>In the short-term, I believe that research funders are the most important stakeholder group for Crossref to focus on, for the following reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>First, with the development of the open Funder Registry and the addition of structured funding data to the Crossref registry, Crossref has already become an important provider of open infrastructure for research funders.</li>
<li>Second, as the result of several key initiatives within the Open Science movement I believe that research funders will play an increasingly important role in determining how scholarly research outputs are created, shared, evaluated, and re-used. Therefore, the active involvement of research funders in Crossref’s membership and governance is essential.</li>
<li>Finally, I believe that there is an important opportunity for Crossref to enable a range of new services across the research lifecycle by providing persistent identifiers and structured metadata research grants. Given how critical grants are within the research process, I’m amazed by the lack of infrastructure to monitor, evaluate, and build upon grants as first-class research objects. In many cases there is minimal, if any, public information about the grants that have been awarded by a particular funder. Even in cases where such data is available, it is rarely structured in a way that enables it to be searched or analyzed across multiple funding agencies.</li>
</ul>
<p>In the absence of a community-driven, non-profit organization like Crossref to provide this infrastructure on an open basis, there is a risk that funders will be forced to rely on proprietary alternatives that limit how this information is used and by whom. Fortunately there are already efforts underway within Crossref to develop both the tools and the community of funders that will be required to create persistent identifiers and structured metadata for grants and other forms of research funding.</p>
<h3 id="5-what-are-the-biggest-challenges-facing-crossref">5. What are the biggest challenges facing Crossref?</h3>
<p>I believe that Crossref’s greatest challenge will be to continue to bring together a diverse group of stakeholders, some of whom are regularly at odds with each other, in order to collaborate in developing tools and services for the benefit of the research community.</p>
<p>As challenging as it has been for Crossref to bring together competing publishers to build the shared services that we have all come to depend on, I believe that keeping the community focused towards a common goal will become even more challenging as that community expands to include funders, universities, and the many other organizations involved in the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, I think that Ed and his team have as good of a chance of succeeding as anyone could hope for, which is why I am so excited about Crossref’s future in the years ahead.</p>
<h3 id="6-how-will-things-change-with-you-as-chair-you-ll-be-busier-i-guess-but-enough-about-you-already-what-can-we-expect-as-staff-and-board">6. How will things change with you as Chair? You’ll be busier I guess. But enough about you already, what can we expect as staff and Board?</h3>
<p>As my first order of business I’ll be getting rid of Crossref’s corporate jet, lavish office spaces, and executive chef. <code>&lt;/sarcasm&gt;</code>.</p>
<p>On a more serious note, my hope is that as Chair I will be able to work with the other members of the board in supporting Crossref’s staff as they work to achieve the ambitious goals we have set out during the past year. I believe that Crossref’s board members and staff are aligned in the desire to significantly expand the range of services Crossref provides, as well as the communities it serves.</p>
<p>The board still has an important role to play in shaping the organization’s strategic vision, while giving staff ample space to execute on this vision. Said another way, I hope to enable some lively strategic conversations among the board while making sure that we don’t get in the way of Ed and his team once it’s time to put ideas into action.</p>
<p>On a more personal note, I hope to be a good sounding board for Ed on any issues that he faces, either internally or externally, on the road ahead. Given my own experience in leading a growing organization through a period of significant change, I know how important it can be to have someone to talk to when difficult challenges arise, which they inevitably will. I hope that I can be a good advisor&mdash;and also a good friend&mdash;to Ed as he leads Crossref into the exciting future that lies ahead.</p>
<h3 id="ginny-thanks-paul-i-know-ed-will-miss-his-personal-chef-but-we-look-forward-to-working-with-you-too">Ginny: Thanks, Paul. I know Ed will miss his personal chef&hellip; but we look forward to working with you too!</h3>Crossref LIVE in Tokyohttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-live-in-tokyo/
Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-live-in-tokyo/<p>What better way to start our program of LIVE locals in 2018 than with a trip to Japan? With the added advantage of it being Valentine’s Day, it seemed a good excuse to share our love of metadata with a group who feel the same way!</p>
<p>We’ve worked closely with the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) since 2002, and were delighted when they agreed to collaborate with us on a LIVE event at their offices in Tokyo.</p>
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<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/val-day.png" alt=“Valentines Day message" height="150px" width="400px" class="img-responsive" />
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<p>With help from the team at JST, we welcomed around 80 attendees—a mix of editors, publishers and enthusiastic metadata users—who all enjoyed the talks from our guest speakers, Nobuko Miyari from ORCID, Ritsuko Nakajima from JST and Tatsuji Tomioka from Kyoto University Library (who talked about the use of DOIs and metadata in their research information repository, named KURENAI).</p>
<p>Vanessa Fairhurst and I also took part in the days program and talked about the different services that Crossref offers. With many of our members in Japan already well-versed in DOIs, we placed the focus of our sessions around the importance of accurate, complete metadata, and new content types (such as peer reviews and preprints). We also discussed our new community initiatives such as the <a href="https://blog.datacite.org/next-steps/">OI project</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/">identifiers for grants</a> and <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata2020</a>.</p>
<p>We’d like to say a big thank you to Kentaro Kinoshita from JST for his help with organizing the event. We’d also like to thank the excellent team of translators who assisted us greatly by relaying the content to the audience in Japanese—being able to offer information and take questions in English and Japanese was an invaluable part of the day.</p>
<h3 id="any-questions-br">Any questions?<br></h3>
<p>One day is never quite enough to cover all things Crossref, so we were happy to answer questions from the enthusiastic audience:</p>
<p><strong>What metadata is required to register peer review reports with Crossref?</strong><br>
To answer this we pointed them to this informative blog on <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/115005255706-Peer-Reviews">peer reviews</a>.</p>
<p><strong>How can I find information on using your REST API?</strong><br>
This is a great starting point, and most information can be found here <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu</a></p>
<p><strong>Is the forthcoming Metadata Manager tool something I can use?</strong><br>
Yes! We hope it will make it much easier for you to deposit good metadata—and if you are in interested in participating in our open beta, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">let us know</a>.</p>
<p>We’re looking forward to continuing to collaborate with JST, and are really grateful for their help in working with us to make the event go so smoothly. Thank you to those who joined us, and we hope to see you again soon.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Thank you to all who attended and spoke at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CRLIVETokyo?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CRLIVETokyo</a> and to <a href="https://twitter.com/jir_o?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jir_o</a> for tweeting and JST for hosting us in Japan 🇯🇵 <a href="https://t.co/nUoM7gr5rR">pic.twitter.com/nUoM7gr5rR</a></p>&mdash; Rachael Lammey (@rachaellammey) <a href="https://twitter.com/rachaellammey/status/963745956490502144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 14, 2018</a></blockquote>
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<p><br></p>Are you having an identity crisis?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/are-you-having-an-identity-crisis/
Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000Amanda Bartellhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/are-you-having-an-identity-crisis/
<p>We work with a huge range of organizations in the scholarly communications world—publishers, libraries, universities, government agencies, funders, publishing service providers, and researcher services providers—and you each have different relationships with us.</p>
<p>Some of you are members who create and disseminate your own content, register it with us by depositing metadata, and help steer our future by voting in our annual board elections. Some of you don&rsquo;t vote in our board elections but do play a vital role by registering content on members&rsquo; behalf.</p>
<p>And some of you make use of the metadata provided by our members and so perform a key service by getting their published works out into the world, but don&rsquo;t vote in our board elections.</p>
<p>After a recent review we realized our Member Types weren&rsquo;t completely clear, and may in fact have led to a bit of confusion. With this in mind, we put some thought into their revision and have now given them the clarity they were missing. Over the course of this year we&rsquo;ll be checking that everyone is in the right group and getting the appropriate support based on your Member Type.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th align="left">Former Member Type name</th>
<th align="left">New Member Type name</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="left">Publisher</td>
<td align="left">Member</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Sponsoring Publisher</td>
<td align="left">Sponsoring Member</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Represented Member</td>
<td align="left">Sponsored Member</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Sponsoring Entity</td>
<td align="left">Sponsoring Organization</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Sponsored Member</td>
<td align="left">Sponsored Organization</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Affiliate</td>
<td align="left">Metadata User</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">Service Provider</td>
<td align="left">(No change to Member Type name)</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br></p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, what&rsquo;s different?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The changes we&rsquo;ve made help to differentiate if you&rsquo;re a voting member (and therefore have a say in our future direction), or not. If you are a voting member, you&rsquo;ll now have the word &ldquo;Member&rdquo; in your title—and if you&rsquo;re not—you won&rsquo;t, as the diagram below indicates.<br>
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Sugar-labels-2.png"" alt="membership map" width="800px" /><br>
Where there are two organizations with a sponsorship arrangement in place (with a sponsoring party and a sponsored party), one of you will always be the voting party, and the other will be non-voting. These partnerships will therefore always contain one &ldquo;Member&rdquo; and one &ldquo;Organization&rdquo;.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve also stopped using the word &ldquo;Publisher&rdquo; in our Member Types as not all our members consider themselves to be publishers — sometimes you&rsquo;re libraries, funders, scholars, repositories, etc. As it says in one of our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/truths">truths</a> &ldquo;Come one, come all: we define publishing broadly. If you communicate research and care about preserving the scholarly record, join us.&rdquo;</p>
<h2 id="how-do-you-know-if-you-are-a-voting-member">How do you know if you are a voting member?</h2>
<p><br>Voting members fall into three Member Types: Members, Sponsoring Members and Sponsored Members.</p>
<p>This means you are Organizations who create and disseminate content, and therefore contribute to the scholarly record. Some of you register your content directly with us and some via a third party, but the key thing is that you&rsquo;re adding to our metadata records, and as such can have a say in the future direction of Crossref. Voting members can also take metadata out of our system — and many of you do — however, your key relationship with us is as a member who is contributing to the scholarly record.</p>
<p>It also means you have <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/terms">obligations</a> to keep your records up-to-date, and maximize links with other Crossref members.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-the-difference-between-the-voting-categories">What&rsquo;s the difference between the voting categories?</h2>
<p><strong>Members</strong><br>
As a Member (formerly known as Publishers), you create and disseminate content, register your own content with us (usually under a single prefix), and are able to vote in our board elections. You pay an annual fee based on your publishing revenue, plus deposit fees for all new DOIs.</p>
<p><strong>Sponsoring Members</strong><br>
As a Sponsoring Member (formerly known as a Sponsoring Publisher), you do everything a standard member does, but as well as registering your own content under your own DOI prefix, you also register content on behalf of other, smaller publishers (ideally using separate DOI prefixes so the metadata is accurate and can be reported on separately and relied upon downstream).</p>
<p>When you vote, you vote on behalf of the organizations that you sponsor. You pay an annual fee based on your publishing revenue/expenses plus the publishing revenue of your sponsored organizations, and you also pay deposit fees for all new metadata records registered. You look after deposit billing for the organizations you sponsor, and provide technical and language support for them.</p>
<p>Some of our larger members may be thinking that you should be in this Member Type - and you&rsquo;re probably right! During the course of 2018 we&rsquo;ll be working with you to transition you over to Sponsoring Membership. If you are a Member who is thinking of becoming a Sponsoring Member, <a href="mailto:member@crossref.org">please get in touch</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Sponsored Members</strong><br>
As a Sponsored Member (formerly known as a Represented Member), you create and disseminate content, but you don&rsquo;t register your content directly with us—this is done by your Sponsoring Organization. Because of this it&rsquo;s you, the one who creates and disseminates the content and thus contributes to the scholarly record, who can vote.</p>
<h2 id="how-do-you-know-if-you-are-a-non-voting-member">How do you know if you are a non-voting member?</h2>
<p>If you haven&rsquo;t spotted yourself yet, you may be one of the non-voting organizations we work with — these fall into four Member Types: Sponsoring Organizations, Sponsored Organizations, Service Providers and Metadata Users.</p>
<p>As a non-voting organization, you may still register content with us, but you either don&rsquo;t create and disseminate the content yourselves, or you&rsquo;re already represented by a voting organization. Non-voting organizations also include those whose only relationship with us is to make use of our metadata. </p>
<h2 id="what-s-the-difference-between-the-non-voting-categories">What&rsquo;s the difference between the non-voting categories?</h2>
<p><strong>Sponsoring Organizations</strong><br>
As a Sponsoring Organization (formerly known as a Sponsoring Affiliate), you don&rsquo;t create and disseminate content yourself, but you do register content with us on behalf of your Sponsored Members — preferably using distinct DOI prefixes for each member. You also often look after their administrative, technical, billing and language support needs. You&rsquo;ll pay us an annual fee based on the publishing revenue of all your members, and deposit fees for all new DOIs. You might charge the members you work with for this service. You also provide support and promotion of our services and activities.</p>
<p><strong>Sponsored Organizations</strong><br>
As a Sponsored Organization (formerly known as a Sponsored Member), you do create and disseminate content yourself, but you don&rsquo;t register your own content. This is done by a Sponsoring Member, and as they have the member vote, you can&rsquo;t have one too. For this reason, we&rsquo;ve removed the word &ldquo;Member&rdquo; from your title, to make your voting position clearer. Of course, your Sponsoring Member needs to represent your needs too when voting, so make sure you make them known!</p>
<p><strong>Service Providers</strong><br>
As a Service Provider you work closely with our members to collect and/or host and/or deposit metadata on their behalf. Unlike a Sponsoring Organization however you don&rsquo;t get involved with administrative, technical, billing or language support for the members you work with, but you&rsquo;re a key partner in helping them deposit quality metadata and contribute effectively to the scholarly record. During 2018 we&rsquo;ll be working more closely with you to help you collaborate with us more effectively.</p>
<p><strong>Metadata Users</strong><br>
Metadata Users (formerly known as Affiliates), you are the organizations who don&rsquo;t register content with us, but you do make use of it through our free and open APIs and search interfaces, or our paid-for Metadata Plus service, giving you access to a premium version of both the REST API and OAI-PMH. Of course all members can get metadata out of our systems as well, but if the only thing you do with us is get metadata out, then you&rsquo;re a Metadata User.</p>
<h3 id="don-t-know-which-member-type-you-are">Don&rsquo;t know which Member Type you are?</h3>
<p>We&rsquo;re hoping these new names make it clearer, but if you&rsquo;re still confused, please get in touch with our <a href="mailto:member@crossref.org">Membership team</a></p>
Wellcome explains the benefits of developing an open and global grant identifierhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/wellcome-explains-the-benefits-of-developing-an-open-and-global-grant-identifier/
Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/wellcome-explains-the-benefits-of-developing-an-open-and-global-grant-identifier/<p>Wellcome, in partnership with Crossref and several research funders including the NIH and the MRC, are looking to pilot an initiative in which new grants would be assigned an open, global and interoperable grant identifier. Robert Kiley (Open Research) and Nina Frentrop (Grants Operations) from the Wellcome explain the potential benefits this would deliver and how it might work.</p>
<h3 id="introduction">Introduction</h3>
<p>As a funder we want to be able to track the outputs that arise from research we have funded. Currently, this is not as straightforward as it should be as researchers do not always cite their funder correctly, let alone their specific grant number. And, even when they do this accurately, because every funder users its own set of grant IDs, these numbers are not unique. For example, we can use EuropePMC to look up outputs from <a href="http://europepmc.org/grantfinder/results?gid=207467&amp;page=1">grants with ID 207467</a>, and see that there is one Wellcome grant with this number, and one from the European Research Council.</p>
<p>To resolve such issues, we need a system in which every grant awarded is giving a unique, global ID. Global IDs are already assigned to articles <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">DOIs</a>, people <a href="https://orcid.org/">ORCIDs</a> and even biological materials <a href="https://scicrunch.org/resources">RRIDs</a>. It is time for the funder community to follow suit.</p>
<h3 id="benefits-of-an-open-global-grant-identifier-system">Benefits of an open &amp; global grant identifier system</h3>
<p>Once implemented, it would make the identification of grant-specific research outputs more accurate, whilst simultaneously reducing the burden on the researcher.</p>
<p>Currently, researchers are typically asked to manually disclose what outputs have arisen from their funding. In the future, such disclosures would be fully automated. We are already seeing how publishers&mdash;who collect ORCIDs through their manuscript submission system&mdash;automatically update the author’s ORCID record with details of new publications. If a global ID system for grants was developed, publishers and repositories could also require these to be disclosed on submission, and this data could then programmatically be passed to researcher assessment platforms, like <a href="https://www.researchfish.net/">ResearchFish</a>.</p>
<h3 id="how-would-it-work">How would it work?</h3>
<p>For a global grant ID system to work, two things need to happen. First, when a new grant is awarded, that grant must be assigned a unique ID. For the pilot project we plan to contract with Crossref who will register a unique ID, (a DOI) for every grant we register.</p>
<p>Second, every DOI must resolve to a publicly accessible web site, where information about that grant is disclosed. Again, for this pilot we will almost certainly use the Europe PMC <a href="http://europepmc.org/grantfinder">Grants Finder Repository</a>, as we already make grant data available from this resource.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZLx7Bv9tXIKVm9oYjnuTDCxLzmdLjcgdUBfSr6h20AY/edit#gid=0">working group</a> has been established to determine precisely what metadata we should make available, but it is likely to include the name of the grant holder, title and value of the award, a short abstract, along with the name of the funder and the unique ID.
Mindful that funders already assign IDs to the grants they award and that any changes to this process may be problematic (and certainly time consuming), the plan is to register a DOI which still makes use of the existing grant ID. To make it unique however, the ID will be prefixed with a funder identifier, most likely the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/funder-registry/">Funder Registry ID</a>.</p>
<h3 id="next-steps">Next steps</h3>
<p>Whilst the metadata working group is focusing on the technical aspects of the pilot, a separate “governance group” is examining how a funder might become a member of Crossref and what the business model for registering grant DOIs should be.</p>
<p>In parallel with this, a pilot “proof of concept” initiative is under way, and we anticipate that by autumn 2018 we will have registered DOIs for a defined cohort of grants.</p>
<p>Ultimately we want to get to a situation where every grant has a unique ID, which can then be unambiguously linked to the all outputs – articles, data, code, materials, patents etc. – which arise from it.</p>
<p>And, if every funder were to adopt such a system and expose their grant metadata in a consistent, machine-readable way, it would facilitate the development of applications to help funders get a greatly enhanced picture of the global funding landscape, which in turn would inform strategic planning and resource allocation.</p>
<h2 id="thanks-to-guest-authors">Thanks to guest authors:</h2>
<p>Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome [<a href="http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4733-2558">ORCID: 0000-0003-4733-2558</a>]
Nina Frentrop, Grants Information &amp; Systems Manager, Wellcome</p>
<hr />
<p>Please read <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/funders">Crossref for funders</a> for context, and contact <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Ginny Hendricks</a> at Crossref with any questions.</p>Meet the members, Part 2 (with protocols.io)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/meet-the-members-part-2-with-protocols.io/
Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/meet-the-members-part-2-with-protocols.io/<p>Second in our <em>Meet the members</em> blog series is Lenny Teytelman, co-founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a>, who gives us a bit of insight into his background and why he started protocols.io, what the future plans for protocols.io are, and how they use and benefit from being a Crossref member.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/large-logo.png" alt=“protocols.io logo" height="150px" width="250px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<h2 id="can-you-tell-us-a-little-bit-about-yourself-and-why-you-started-protocols-io">Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and why you started protocols.io?</h2>
<p>I am a computational and experimental biologist, and it was my struggle with correcting a published research method as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT that led me to co-found <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a>. I spent a year and a half correcting a single step of a research recipe. Instead of 1ul of a chemical, it needed 5, instead of a 15-minute incubation, it needed an hour. But this was a correction of something previously published, not a new method, so absurdly, it was not a result that I could publish. That means I got no credit for this year and a half, and more importantly, every other scientist using this recipe is either getting misleading results or has to waste 1-2 years rediscovering what I know—rediscovering something that I’d love to share, but have no easy way of doing so.</p>
<p>So, I became obsessed with creating a central place where scientists can easily share and discover detailed research recipes. We’re open access, free-to-read and free-to-publish, with web &amp; mobile apps that make these protocols dynamic and interactive.</p>
<h2 id="what-problem-is-your-service-trying-to-solve">What problem is your service trying to solve?</h2>
<p>Currently, methods sections of research papers are full of things like &ldquo;we used a slightly modified version of the method reported in paperX&rdquo;. Here are two examples:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">2017: “Devices were fabricated as previously described [ref 8]” <br><br>[ref 8] 2015: “Devices were fabricated as previously described [ref 4]”<br><br>[ref 4] 2013: “Devices were fabricated as previously described [ref 2]”<br><br>[ref 2] 2009: “Devices were fabricated with conventional methods”</p>&mdash; Daniel Gonzales (@dgonzales1990) <a href="https://twitter.com/dgonzales1990/status/953737802205794304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>We are working to increase reproducibility, by encouraging precise detailing of methods and then making it easy to keep these methods up-to-date, long after the paper is published. More broadly, our mission is to accelerate science by getting the detailed knowledge out of paper notebooks, and getting it out in months, instead of years.</p>
<h2 id="tell-us-a-little-bit-about-what-you-publish-and-for-whom">Tell us a little bit about what you publish and for whom.</h2>
<p>Both the content, and the audience for it, has been expanding recently. When we launched in 2014, the protocols were almost exclusively wetlab biology recipes. In 2015, we added support for computational workflows and began to see bioinformatics methods. More recently, thanks to the referrals from <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone">PLOS ONE,</a> we&rsquo;ve started to see protocols for human trials, medical devices, psychology, and more. About half a year ago, we changed our landing page form &ldquo;Open Access Repository of Life Science Methods&rdquo; to the more general &ldquo;Open Access Repository of Research Methods&rdquo;.</p>
<p>The readership is also broadening, it’s no longer just professional researchers—we now have protocols and guidelines for undergraduate and high school students, instructions for citizen science projects, and even standard operating procedures for lab management. We&rsquo;ve also been seeing more off-the-shelf use, with people sharing actual cooking recipes, and we recently began asking authors to classify whether they are sharing &ldquo;research&rdquo; or &ldquo;non-research&rdquo; instructions.</p>
<h2 id="how-would-you-describe-the-value-of-being-a-crossref-member">How would you describe the value of being a Crossref member?</h2>
<p>Without a doubt, we would be nowhere close to the adoption and sharing that we have now if we were not members of Crossref, registering DOIs for all public protocols. This is an absolute prerequisite for being included in author guidelines of journals, and we wouldn&rsquo;t have grown in 2017 from two to over 200 journals that encourage authors to detail their recipes on <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a>.</p>
<p>In addition to the benefit to <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io,</a> there is a benefit to the scientists in terms of the quality control that Crossref ensures among the members. Much of this is behind the scenes and invisible to the researchers visiting <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a>.</p>
<p>For example, in the beginning, we used to simply delete spam protocols. However, once we started issuing DOIs, we realized that we would be violating the Crossref requirements for minted DOIs if we simply trashed these. As a result, we had to build &ldquo;retraction&rdquo; functionality that allows us to take down content, put up a notice explaining the reason for removal, and keep the record so that the respective DOI continues to resolve. This is the correct way to handle removals of scientific content and it is Crossref that made us mature and improve the platform. (We&rsquo;ve since had to use the retraction functionality at the request of scientists, and we&rsquo;re glad we implemented it to comply with the Crossref requirements.)</p>
<p>Another example is the resolution report that we routinely get from Crossref, showing us which DOIs are broken. It highlights errors for us and helps us to investigate, identify, and prevent problems with the journal partners.</p>
<h2 id="what-do-you-see-as-the-value-of-crossref-beyond-protocols-io-https-www-protocols-io">What do you see as the value of Crossref, beyond <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a>?</h2>
<p>As I argued <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta2M_gkgeKI&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj16f8DRwCADugYIaaXN_fZO&amp;index=9">in my talk</a> at the annual Crossref conference, we are finally in a position to connect scientists with the knowledge they need, automatically. Almost every scientist uses a reference manager such as Mendeley, Zotero, Paperpile, etc. to manage their literature bibliography. In turn, that means that in theory, when something happens to a paper or research objects connected to the paper (retraction, correction, update to the dataset accompanying the manuscript), the reference management platforms could notify every scientist who has that paper in their library.</p>
<p>The problem is that it isn&rsquo;t feasible for every service like Mendeley to connect to every repository and publisher to track events connected to every paper. This is where Crossref is positioned so powerfully. By collecting the metadata linking papers to the research objects, Crossref can be the single source that the platforms need to query to see if there is news for their users related to any specific published paper. (More of this from my talk was captured really nicely in <a href="http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/scholarly-maps-recommenders-reference.html">this</a> blog post by the SMU librarian Aaron Tay.</p>
<h2 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-protocols-io-https-www-protocols-io">What are the future plans for <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a>?</h2>
<p>Expanding <a href="https://www.protocols.io">protocols.io</a> content to include chemistry workflows is an important goal for 2018-19.</p>
<p>We are also eager to start on connecting the protocols directly to the devices that the scientists use. Imagine you need to spin your cells for 30 seconds, but the centrifuge is accidentally set for 3 minutes. Our app should be able to connect to the equipment and alert the researcher to the wrong setting, asking if they are sure they want to proceed.</p>
<p><br></p>No longer lost in translationhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/no-longer-lost-in-translation/
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/no-longer-lost-in-translation/<p>More than 80% of the record breaking 1,939 new members we welcomed in 2017 were from non-English speaking countries, and as our member base grows in its diversity, so does the need for us to share information about Crossref and its services in languages appropriate to our changing audience.</p>
<p>So, early last year we started translating our service videos into six other languages: French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. However, the process of translating from one language to another is not always straightforward—but it is super important—as some things can get seriously lost in translation&hellip;</p>
<p>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/dog.png" height="250px" width="300px"/>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/foot.png" height="250px" width="300px"/>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/luggage.png" height="250px" width="300px"/>|</p>
<p>In order to avoid such translation tragedies we created a foolproof process to get the text of the service videos translated and ready for production. (I am, I realize, exposing myself here—see what I did there? —by using a word like foolproof.)</p>
<p>First we produced the videos in English, setting the content to animation and sound (AKA audio visual or A/V to us marketing types), then we brought in a translation company to turn the English content into the six other languages. So far so good. However, as the above examples demonstrate, the <em>meaning</em> of words can get lost in translation. Also, what Crossref does isn’t the easiest thing in the world to translate (<em>are</em> there words for <em>metadata delivery</em> and <em>full-text XML</em> in Japanese?), so we added another stage to the process.</p>
<p>Next, we sent the translated scripts and their English counterparts to some very helpful international members who, as part of the scholarly research community, understand the complexities of our work and are therefore qualified to check that the text had remained <em>in context.</em></p>
<p>Unfortunately, it hadn’t, as the text came back from them heavily edited. After round two of the editing process, the revised text was applied to the videos—but just to be 100% sure, we sent the completed videos back to our helpful international members for a final run through.</p>
<p>Multiply this painstaking process by 48 videos, throw numerous time zones into the mix and you can see why it took us nearly 12 months to complete them.</p>
<p>And so, it is with great pleasure that today we launch all eight of our service videos in six languages, just click the links below, and enjoy! Découvrez-les!​ ¡Que los disfrutes! Aproveite! 请欣赏! どうぞお楽しみください！ 즐거운 시간 되세요!</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th align="center"></th>
<th align="center"></th>
<th align="center"></th>
<th align="center">View videos by language</th>
<th align="center"></th>
<th align="center"></th>
<th align="center"></th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe_-TawAqQj2f2I-TevZcFchyhEAhkQ0g">English</a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK3LAAfm1-U&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj22lY2dikyWA3XCvmDaZcEV">French</a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G309-3KW7ok&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj02nIuITrQdds9Vt8A2jKvm">Spanish</a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI1peEvLINU&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj37hN_S8Qice7DDB6cu1TPZ">Brazilian Portuguese</a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXPCYulcEHs&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj0zVsT6A3ym6HLMHAXMWORd">Simplified Chinese</a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPvf4Zl2qLY&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj05sOlOtYsV1uiBAydpvxKr">Japanese</a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_yXjiinHG0&amp;list=PLe_-TawAqQj2pHiy0XZRWctA-ac_hUcVx">Korean</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center">English</td>
<td align="center">français</td>
<td align="center">español</td>
<td align="center">português do Brasil</td>
<td align="center">简体中文</td>
<td align="center">日本語</td>
<td align="center">한국어로</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br><br>
<em>We&rsquo;d like to thank the following for their help in checking the video translations: Fabienne Meyers from IUCAP for the French versions, our very own resident translator Vanessa Fairhurst for the Spanish versions, Edilson Damasio from the University Library of Maringá for the Brazilian Portuguese versions, Guo Xiaofeng from Wanfang Data for the Chinese versions, Nobuko Miyairi from ORCID for the Japanese versions and Junghyo from Nurimedia and Jae Hwa Chang at infoLumi for the Korean versions.</em></p>
<hr />A year in the life of Crossrefhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-year-in-the-life-of-crossref/
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-year-in-the-life-of-crossref/<p>We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography&mdash;with the highest number of new members joining from Asia&mdash;we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is Crossref?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We are an organization that runs a registry of metadata and DOIs of course, but we are much more than that&mdash;staff, board, working groups, and committees as well as a broad range of collaborators, users, and supporters in the wider scholarly communications community. Increasingly, our community includes new contributors like scholars, funders, and universities. Together, we are all working toward the same goal&mdash;to enhance scholarly communications. Everything we do is designed to put scholarly content in context so that the content our members publish can be found, cited, used, and re-used.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s how we did that over the past year:</p>
<h2 id="we-rallied-the-community">We rallied the community</h2>
<p>Rallying the community is all about working together to forge new relationships and pave the way for future generations of researchers&mdash;in 2017 we were closely involved with the launch of <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata 2020</a>; a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable metadata for all research outputs.</p>
<h2 id="we-tagged-and-shared-metadata">We tagged and shared metadata</h2>
<p>To make sure that our APIs continue to have real, genuine utility, we introduced a new service called <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/news/2017-11-15-new-metadata-plus-service-launching/">Metadata Plus</a> in 2017 so that platforms and tools can leverage the power of our rich, immense database to increase the value and discoverability of content.</p>
<h2 id="we-played-with-new-technology">We played with new technology</h2>
<p>To keep pace with changes in the industry and stay true to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/about/">our mission</a>, we often play with new technology with the goal of offering a bigger and better infrastructure. In 2017 we formed a working group and an advisory group for two new identifiers that will see this infrastructure increase; <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/organization-identifier-working-group-update/">Organization IDs</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/">Grant IDs</a>.</p>
<h2 id="we-made-new-tools-and-services">We made new tools and services</h2>
<p>Combining our own knowledge and experience with input from the wider community, in 2017 we were able to launch in Beta a new and exciting tool called <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-enters-beta/">Event Data</a>. Event Data provides a record of where research has been bookmarked, linked, recommended, shared, referenced, commented on etc, beyond publisher platforms&mdash;which is a great example of putting scholarly research in a wider context.</p>
<hr />
<p>So, while richer metadata (including more content types) remains our focus 2018 and beyond, we also hope that as we become a bigger and more global community we can move beyond the basics and work together to make sure that DOIs, are not the be-all and end-all when they are, in fact, just the beginning.</p>Bridging Identifiers at PIDapaloozahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/bridging-identifiers-at-pidapalooza/
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Joe Wasshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/bridging-identifiers-at-pidapalooza/
<p>Hello from sunny Girona! I&rsquo;m heading to <a href="https://pidapalooza.org/">PIDapalooza</a>, the Persistent Identifier festival, as it returns for its second year. It&rsquo;s all about to kick off.</p>
<p>One of the themes this year is &ldquo;bridging worlds&rdquo;: how to bring together different communities and the identifiers they use. Something I really enjoyed about PIDapalooza last year was the variety of people who came. We heard about some &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; identifier systems (at least, it seems that way to us): DOIs for publications, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers. But, gathered in Reykjavik, under dark Icelandic skies, I met oceanographic surveyors assigning DOIs to drilling equipment, heard stories of identifiers in Chinese milk production and consoled librarians trying navigate the identifier landscape.</p>
<p>In addition to the usual scholarly publishing and science communication crowd, it was encouraging to see a real diversity of people from different walks of life encounter the same problems and work on them them collaboratively. The thing that brought everyone together was the understanding that if we&rsquo;re going to reliably reference things &ndash; be they researchers, articles they write, or ships they sail &ndash; we need to give them identifiers. And those identifiers should be as good as possible: persistent, resolvable, interoperable.</p>
<h2 id="who-cares-about-pids">Who cares about PIDs?</h2>
<p>At the turn of the century, a handful of publishers came together to create Crossref (or <em>CrossRef</em> as it was in those days). It was becoming increasingly important to be able to store references in machine-readable format, but publishers were faced with a problem. If an author wants to cite an article, they&rsquo;ll do so without worrying who published it. This means they needed an identifier system that worked across all publishers. Thus the Crossref DOI was born.</p>
<p>Today we&rsquo;re heading toward 10,000 members, and the thing that they have in common is that they all produce scholarly content and care about how it&rsquo;s referenced. As a trade association, we effectively act on behalf of all of our members, allowing them to register their content, share metadata and links, and assign an identifier.</p>
<p>But there&rsquo;s a whole world out there. Publications have never been the be-all and end-all of scholarship, but they have been a backbone. But more and more scholarship, especially science, is done outside journal publishing. Sometimes it&rsquo;s done on platforms that care about the scholarly record as much as publishers. And sometimes it isn&rsquo;t.</p>
<h2 id="the-twitterverse">The Twitterverse</h2>
<p>Lots of people use Twitter to talk about science. Some are scientists, some aren&rsquo;t. Scientific articles are linked from news reports and discussed on blogs. Gone are the days of scholarly articles being cited only by other scholarly articles. We see links coming in from all over the place. And, although not all of this can be counted as the &ldquo;scholarly record&rdquo;, some of it <em>could</em> be.</p>
<p>The barrier-to-entry for journals publishing means that science journals contain only science articles. The barrier-to-entry for Twitter means that anyone can, and does, publish there. My Twitter feed is finely balanced between bibliometrics research, marine biology and pictures of snow leopards with Japanese captions. I don&rsquo;t understand all of it, but I like looking at the pictures.</p>
<p>Back in the days when the only references to scholarly publications were from other scholarly publications, it was easy to keep track of those references. When an article was published, its references went into a citation database. This happened because the publisher considered this important.</p>
<p>But Twitter, the publisher of tweets, doesn&rsquo;t care. It is used for a huge variety of communications and although some people choose to use it to engage in scholarship, we&rsquo;re just a blip on their radar. The same goes for Reddit, a platform that describes itself as &ldquo;the front page of the Internet&rdquo;. There are communities engaged in scientific discussions, but Reddit doesn&rsquo;t feel the need to publish its bibliographic references.</p>
<p>Nor should it.</p>
<h2 id="bridging-those-who-care-with-those-who-don-t">Bridging those who care with those who don&rsquo;t</h2>
<p>The barrier-to-entry for contributing to scientific discussions has lowered, meaning that the role of more non-specialist platforms has increased.</p>
<p>I imagine that there are other communities out there who have their own concerns about the web. Maybe there are model train enthusiasts who want to keep track of every reference to a particular model. Or political commentators who want to keep track of how certain politicians and policies are discussed. As the scholarly community embraces new platforms for communicating, we should recognise that we are part of a broader universe of people using those platforms for more diverse reasons.</p>
<p>Gone are the days when the only way to reply to an article was by writing a letter to the editor. But also gone are the days when you could guarantee that your letter wouldn&rsquo;t appear next to cat pictures (assuming you weren&rsquo;t writing to the <a href="https://0-journals-sagepub-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/home/jfm">Journal of Feline Medicine &amp; Surgery</a>). As a specialist community cohabiting online spaces with non-specialists, it falls to us to do whatever we need to adapt that space and make it our own. In our case, this means recording bibliographic references as and where they occur.</p>
<p>Something like this happened once before. As traditional publishers went online, they created Crossref to build and maintain the necessary infrastructure. We&rsquo;re acting on behalf of the community again to collect links from non-traditional sources. Because we can&rsquo;t go to platforms like Twitter and say &ldquo;please deposit your references&rdquo;, we&rsquo;re doing the opposite. We identify a platform, then work out how to scrape its content and extract links.</p>
<h2 id="working-at-scale">Working at scale</h2>
<p>So we&rsquo;re broadening out the universe of references that we would like to track from &ldquo;traditional scholarly publishing&rdquo; to &ldquo;the entire web&rdquo;. There are four broad challenges inherent in this, and we think that Crossref infrastructure is the right way to meet them.</p>
<p>The first challenge is physically finding the links. Because social media platforms aren&rsquo;t specialised for scholarly publishing, they don&rsquo;t have the same mechanisms in place for capturing bibliographic references. This means that we have to do it ourselves by scraping webpages for references. As the standard-bearer for scholarly PIDs, we think we can do a good job of this.</p>
<p>The second challenge is doing this at the scale of the web. Because we might, in theory, find a link on any webpage, there is a literally infinite number of publishing platforms. From big websites like BBC News down to tiny blogs run out of a bedroom. It would be impossible to partner with each of these individually. The way to solve this is to run a centralised service which goes out and contacts as many sources as possible. This role is a collaborative one. Our system is open to inspection, suggestions and contributions from the community.</p>
<p>The third challenge is the sheer number of publishers. Because they all register content with us, we are in good position to track their DOIs. In addition to that, every member of Crossref publishes content on their own platform, and has their own set of websites to track. We monitor our members&rsquo; websites and create a central list of domains that we look for. If this wasn&rsquo;t done centrally, each publisher would have to run its own web crawlers and perform the same work, only to filter out their own links.</p>
<p>The fourth challenge is how to get all that data to the public. Even if every publisher were able to run their own infrastructure, it would make it very difficult to consume. Through Crossref metadata services, publishers have built a system where you can look up metadata and link to articles without worrying who published them. We think that the same approach should apply to this new link data.</p>
<p>For these reasons, we&rsquo;re building Crossref Event Data: a system that monitors as many platforms as we can think of, and brings them into one place, and serves the whole community.</p>
<h2 id="building-bridges">Building bridges</h2>
<p>If you&rsquo;ve been <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/authors/joe-wass/">following along</a> you&rsquo;ll know that <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/you-do-want-to-see-how-its-made-seeing-what-goes-into-altmetrics/">my last metaphor was the process of refining crude oil</a>. I like metaphors, and mixing them. After all, you can&rsquo;t mix a good metaphor without breaking a few eggs into the mixing bowl. Today&rsquo;s metaphors are bridges. And not just one.</p>
<h2 id="bridge-1-pids-and-urls">Bridge 1: PIDs and URLs</h2>
<p>In the world of Persistent Identifiers, we&rsquo;re quite good at linking. Organizations like Crossref, DataCite and ORCID run separate systems but we work together to record and exchange links. But the web is different. There&rsquo;s no single organization in control and there are many organizations working to catalogue it. Event Data is our offering: bridging the web with our identifiers.</p>
<h2 id="bridge-2-scholarly-link-providers">Bridge 2: Scholarly link providers</h2>
<p>Of course, some platforms and systems <em>do</em> care about persistence and Persistent Identifiers. Event Data is an open platform, and we&rsquo;re collaborating with a few providers to publish links.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve partnered with <a href="https://www.lens.org/lens/">The Lens</a> to include Patent to DOI references. We&rsquo;re working with F1000 to include links between reviews and articles. Hopefully we&rsquo;ll see more organizations use Event Data to publish their links.</p>
<h2 id="bridge-3-crossref-datacite">Bridge 3: Crossref / DataCite</h2>
<p>Event Data is a collaborative project between DataCite and Crossref. When Crossref Registered Content contains a reference to a DataCite DOI we put it into Event Data. DataCite do the same in reverse. This means that Event Data contains a huge number of article - dataset links.</p>
<h2 id="bridge-4-traditional-discussions-vs-new-ones">Bridge 4: Traditional discussions vs new ones</h2>
<p>At each moment, scholarly discussions are happening in the literature, on various social media platforms and on the web at large. They are all talking about the same thing, but are spread out. Event Data collects links wherever we find them and brings them into one place. By doing this we hope we can help bring those conversations together.</p>
<h2 id="bridge-5-bridging-bibliometricians-and-altmetricians-to-data-sources">Bridge 5: Bridging bibliometricians and altmetricians to data sources</h2>
<p>Capturing links from social media to published literature underpins the field of altmetrics. By collecting this data and making it available under open licenses, we bring it to altmetrics researchers. We don&rsquo;t provide metrics, but we do provide the data points that can form the basis for research.</p>
<p>Without infrastructure for collecting data, researchers would have to perform the same work over and over again. Because the data is all open, we allow datasets to be republished, reworked and replicated.</p>
<h2 id="bridge-6-bridging-the-evidence-gap">Bridge 6: Bridging the Evidence Gap</h2>
<p>Running Event Data involves collecting a lot of data - gigabytes per day - and boiling it down into hundreds of thousands of individual Events per day. People consuming the data may want to do further boiling down. At every point of the process we record the input data that we were working from, the internal thought process of the system, and the Events that were produced. A researcher can use the Evidence Logs to trace through the entire process that led to an Event.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;re a bridge from websites and social media to data consumers. But we take the role very seriously, and there&rsquo;s nothing hidden. A <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhangjiajie_Glass_Bridge">glass bridge</a>, you could say.</p>
<h2 id="interesting-challenges">Interesting challenges</h2>
<p>It&rsquo;s not all plain sailing. There are a few challenges along the way to collecting this data which anyone who wanted to collect this kind of information would face. By collecting it in a central place and running an open platform we can solve each problem once, and improve our process as a community.</p>
<p>One problem is choosing what to include. We include any link that we find from a non-publisher website. That means that invariably some of the links are from spam. This problem isn&rsquo;t new: we see low-quality articles being published in traditional journals from time to time. We try to include all of the data we can find and pass it onto consumers. They might want to whitelist certain sources, or they may want all of the data because they&rsquo;re trying to study scholarly spam. We have decided to provide data as Events, which strike the balance between atomicity and usefulness.</p>
<p>Another, which I talked about at last year&rsquo;s PIDapalooza, is how we track article landing pages. Read <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/urls-and-dois-a-complicated-relationship/">the blog post</a>, the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/data/ids-and-urls/">user guide</a> or hop in a time machine if you&rsquo;re interested.</p>
<h2 id="the-thing-about-bridges">The thing about bridges&hellip;</h2>
<p>&hellip; is that they help people get where they&rsquo;re going. With a few notable exceptions, they&rsquo;re not the main attraction. We play a humble part in scholarly publishing, helping collect and distribute metadata. Most of what we do goes unseen, and helps people create tools, platforms and research. Event Data is an API, and whilst we hope people will build all kinds of things with it, including altmetrics tools, we&rsquo;re not making another metric.</p>
<h2 id="pidapalooza">PIDapalooza</h2>
<p>All of which brings me to my talk, which I&rsquo;m giving on Wednesday: <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/Cwmw/event-data-bridging-persistent-and-not-so-persistent-identifiers">Bridging persistent and not-so-persistent identifiers</a>. I would tell you about it, but there isn&rsquo;t much more left to say.</p>
<p>If you want to find out more, we&rsquo;re currently in Beta, and open for business. Head over to the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/index.html">User Guide</a> to get started!</p>
Crossref ambassador programhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-ambassador-program/
Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-ambassador-program/
<p>We have listened to the feedback from you, our members, and you&rsquo;ve told us of a need for local experts to provide support in your timezone and language, and to act as liaisons with the Crossref team. You&rsquo;ve also asked for an increased number of training events both online and in person close to you, and for more representatives from Crossref at regional industry events.</p>
<p>We want to make sure we can reach members around the globe, and as such, a wide team of people is required who are knowledgeable in the languages, cultures, and member needs in a variety of countries. This is why we&rsquo;re launching our Ambassador Program.</p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/crossref-ambassadors-logo-rgb.jpg" alt="image of Crossref Ambassadors Logo" width="500px" />
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What are Crossref Ambassadors?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Crossref Ambassadors are volunteers who work within the international scholarly research community in a variety of different roles such as librarians, researchers or editors to name but a few. They are individuals who are well connected, value the work that Crossref does and are passionate about improving scholarly communication and the role Crossref plays within this system.</p>
<p>Some of the activities our ambassadors will undertake:</p>
<ul>
<li>Staying up-to-speed with Crossref developments, for example, by attending webinars and maintaining regular check-ins with the Crossref team.</li>
<li>Engaging in the online community platform; providing feedback, joining in discussions and helping other members to resolve issues posted to the group.</li>
<li>Writing blog posts, or contributing to newsletters.</li>
<li>Participating in beta-testing of new products and services.</li>
<li>Helping with local LIVE events; for example, providing recommendations on speakers or venues, helping with logistics and presenting at the event.</li>
<li>Helping with the translation of Crossref material and content into local languages.</li>
<li>Running webinars on different Crossref services in local languages.</li>
<li>Running training sessions locally with Crossref members</li>
<li>Representing Crossref at relevant industry events</li>
</ul>
<p>It is important that our ambassadors enjoy the work they are doing with Crossref by contributing in ways in which they feel comfortable, according to their interests, skills and the time they feel they want to contribute. For this reason, the role comes with a high degree of flexibility.</p>
<p>We see our ambassadors as valued members of the Crossref network and will provide them with:</p>
<ul>
<li>A dedicated contact for any upcoming news, or to share ideas, queries or concerns.</li>
<li>Help with content for proposal calls, presentations, training and written articles.</li>
<li>Crossref materials and giveaways (plus ambassador-branded materials).</li>
<li>Personal endorsement via Crossref</li>
<li>Training on Crossref services and on wider relevant skills as necessary.</li>
<li>First look at new Crossref developments</li>
<li>Certification from Crossref on ambassador and training status.</li>
<li>Personal ambassador logo or badge for use on email, website and profile on the Crossref online community forum (launching later this year).</li>
</ul>
<p>Crossref Ambassadors will become an increasingly key part of the Crossref community - the first port of call for updates or to test out new products or services, and the eyes and ears within the local academic community - working closely with Crossref to make scholarly communications better for all.</p>
<h3 id="meet-our-first-ambassadors">Meet our first ambassadors!</h3>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/jae-hwa-chang-sq.jpg" alt="image of Jae Hwa Chang" width="300px" />
</div>
<p><strong>Jae Hwa Chang</strong> has been working at infoLumi as a manuscript editor in academic journals since 2010. Prior to joining infoLumi, she was a medical librarian at International Vaccine Institute and was engaged in medical information management and service. Her interests in information control and management started when she was doing work indexing newspaper articles at JoonAng Ilbo. She was fascinated by Crossref’s persistent efforts and contribution in developing new services to “make content easy to find, cite, link, and assess” and has been introducing them to Korean scholarly publishing communities. Jae earned her MA in Library and Information Science from Ewha Womans University, Korea. She serves as a vice chair of the Committee on Planning and Administration at the Korean Council of Science Editors. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and experiencing new cultures.</p>
<p>장재화는 2010년부터 인포루미에서 의학학술지 원고편집을 담당하고 있다. 그전에는 국제백신연구소 도서관에서 사서로 일하면서 의학정보와 학술지논문 유통에 관심을 가졌으며, 그에 앞서서는 중앙일보에서 신문기사 DB 색인을 하면서 정보관리와 활용에 대해 연구하였다. 정보의 검색, 평가, 활용을 위해 꾸준히 새로운 서비스를 개발하는 Crossref에 매력을 느꼈고, 그 서비스들을 한국의 학술지 출판 관계자들에게 소개해왔다. 이화여자대학교에서 문헌정보학을 전공하였고, 한국과학학술지편집인협의회 기획운영위원회 부위원장을 맡고 있다. 여행과 다양한 문화 체험을 즐긴다.</p>
<p><br></p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/edilson-demasio-sq.jpg" alt="image of Edilson Demasio" width="300px" />
</div>
<p><strong>Edilson Demasio</strong> has been a librarian since 1995, with PhD. in Information Science at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro-UFRJ/IBICT. He works in the Department of Mathematics Library of State University of Maringá-UEM, Brazil. With 20 years&rsquo; experience in scientific metadata and publishing. His expertise is various including knowledge in scientific communication, Crossref services, research integrity, misconduct prevention in science, publishing on Latin America, biomedical information, OJS-Open Journal Systems, Open Access journals, scientific journals quality and indexing, and scientific bibliographical databases. He is enthusiastic about presenting and disseminating information about Crossref services to his community in Brazil and working within the community, exchanging ideas and experience.</p>
<p>Eu sou bibliotecário desde 1995, Doutor em Ciência da Informação pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro-UFRJ/convênio IBICT. Eu trabalho na Biblioteca do Departamento de Matemática da Universidade Estadual de Maringá-UEM. Com 20 anos de experiência em metadados científicos e editoração, entre outros. Meus conhecimentos são diversos sobre comunicação científica, cientometria, metadados XML, serviços Crossref, integridade em pesquisa, prevenção de más condutas na ciência, editoração, editoração na América Latina, informação biomédica, OJS-Open Journal Systems, revistas de Acesso Aberto, qualidade de periódicos científicos e indexação, bases de dados bibliográficas. Gosto de disseminar meu conhecimento a outras regiões e pessoas e de trabalhar em comunidade junto as instituições e outros países, de planejar novas apresentações, de trocar experiências como palestrante ou convidado e trabalhar na disseminação do conhecimento para todos.</p>
<p><br></p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/lauren-lissaris-sq.jpg" alt="image of Lauren Lissaris" width="300px" />
</div>
<p><strong>Lauren Lissaris</strong> has dedicated much of her career to the dissemination of valuable content on a robust platform. She takes pride in her achievements as the Digital Content Manager at JSTOR. <a href="http://0-www.jstor.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">JSTOR</a> provides access to more than 10 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. JSTOR is part of <a href="http://www.ithaka.org/">ITHAKA</a>, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.</p>
<p>Lauren successfully works with all aspects of journal content to effectively assist publishers with their digital content. This includes everything from XML markup, DOI depositing/multiple resolution, and HTML website updates. Lauren has been involved in hosting current content on JSTOR since the program&rsquo;s launch in 2010. She continues to collaborate with organizations to successfully contribute to the evolution of digital content. The natural spread from journals to books has set Lauren up for developing and planning the book DOI depositing program for JSTOR. She is a member of the Crossref Books Advisory Group and she helped successfully pilot Crossref’s new Co-access book deposit feature.</p>
<p>If you want to find out more information on the Ambassador Program, or you would like to express your interest in being an ambassador, you can either contact us at <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org?subject=Ambassador Program">feedback@crossref.org</a> or complete our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/ambassadors/">online form</a>.</p>
Metadata and integrity: the unlikely bedfellows of scholarly researchhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/metadata-and-integrity-the-unlikely-bedfellows-of-scholarly-research/
Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000Damian Pattinsonhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/metadata-and-integrity-the-unlikely-bedfellows-of-scholarly-research/<p>I was invited recently to present parliamentary evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on the subject of Research Integrity. For those not familiar with the arcane workings of the British Parliamentary system, a Select Committee is essentially the place where governments, and government bodies, are held to account. So it was refreshing to be invited to a hearing that wasn’t about Brexit.</p>
<p>The interest of the British Parliament in the integrity of scientific research confirms just how far science’s ongoing “reproducibility crisis” has reached. The fact that a large proportion of the published literature cannot be reproduced is clearly problematic, and this call to action from MPs is very welcome. And why would the government not be interested? At stake is the process of how new knowledge is created, and how reliable that purported knowledge is.</p>
<p>The other issue driving this overview of research practices are the cases of deliberate fraud and wrongdoing that have recently created headlines (e.g., the <a href="https://0-www-nature-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/news/stap-1.15332">STAP papers</a> concerning the reprogramming of stem cells). While these cases are clearly dramatic outliers, they nevertheless serve to diminish public confidence in scholarly research and the findings that come out of this enterprise.</p>
<p>As with most inquiries, the question quickly boiled down to: who is to blame? As Bill Grant MP asked me directly, “Where does the responsibility lie?”</p>
<p>My answer was lifted from an article by Ginny Barbour and colleagues in <em>F1000Research</em> this November (<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.13060.1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.12688/f1000research.13060.1</a>): publishers are responsible for the integrity of the published literature, while institutions and employers are ultimately responsible for the conduct of their staff. Misconduct entails intent, usually to deceive the reader into believing a conclusion that the researcher wishes them to believe. But journal editors can never know, and are not in a position to investigate, whether a researcher has <em>deliberately</em> falsified their data.</p>
<p>However, there are things that publishers can do to ensure high standards of integrity. Much of this involves making a study’s authors publish as much information about what they have done as possible - the more the reader can see of how data were generated, the more that reader can trust the findings communicated in the published article.</p>
<p>Article metadata directly supports this function. It provides structure and transparency to information pertaining to ethics and integrity. And because metadata is independent of the main article, it can be readable even if the article itself is locked behind a paywall.</p>
<p>Crossref already provides metadata that can demonstrate the integrity of published articles. The metadata collected on 91+ million scholarly works across publishers and disciplines is open and freely accessible to all. Bibliographic information, for example, allows readers to see who the authors of the article are, where they are from, and what else they have published. Similarly, funding data allows readers to identify potential conflicts of interest, for example if the funder has commercial or political affiliations. Even if the reader cannot see the conflict of interest statement (or if the journal has not provided one), they can use the funding statement to surface potential conflicts.</p>
<p>And if they wanted, publishers could provide additional metadata to add still more transparency to the research process. Ethical approval by institutional review boards, for example, could be captured, and any protocol numbers traced back to the original ethics committee approval. At present the process of ethical approval varies from country to country, and from institution to institution. Encouraging authors and journals to deposit information on the approval process would both demonstrate the high ethical standards the author is working to, and also improve the standards themselves, since institutions would have to encode their approval processes in a way that is understandable to others. This could pave the way to significantly higher international ethical standards, all through a simple addition to the indexed metadata underlying the scholarly literature.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One key recommendation that I and many others made to the Committee was, in short, &ldquo;show your work&rdquo;. As a researcher, that means showing your data. As a publisher, that means showing what checks you have done. In both cases, metadata can help.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A major issue that publishers and researchers can – and should – address is the provision of actual scientific data. Most papers, today, present only the end results of the authors’ (often quite extensive) analyses. The case for sharing data is an obvious one - many recent cases of misconduct could have been identified earlier, or even avoided altogether, if editors and readers had had access to underlying datasets.</p>
<p>With images, a requirement to submit raw images alongside the edited figures would dramatically reduce the cases of manipulation that are rife in the literature (studies suggest up to 20% of papers have some kind of inappropriate figure manipulation, with around 1 in 40 papers showing manipulation beyond that which can be expected to be a result of error). Similarly, providing the numbers that a paper’s analyses are based upon would allow readers to fully assess if datasets are distributed as would be expected through random sampling, and, if they choose, to determine if the data are sufficient to support the statistical inferences made in the paper. The Crossref schema – by providing unique identifiers to data citations - makes this link between data and paper possible. (See the recent blog post on the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus---better-research-through-better-metadata">Research Nexus</a> for more information.)</p>
<p>For publishers, showing your work also means being transparent to your readers about the editorial checks that a manuscript has undergone. Crossref has a tool that enables this editorial transparency: it’s called <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark">Crossmark</a>. Crossmark allows readers to see the most up-to-date information about an article, even on downloaded PDFs. In most cases it is used to show whether the version of an article is most recent one, or whether any corrigenda or retractions have been subsequently added. But it can also be used to provide whatever information a publisher wishes to share about the paper. Some journals have experimented with using Crossmark to ‘thread’ publications together, for example, by linking all the outputs generated from a single clinical trial registration number (<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linked-clinical-trials-are-here">blog post here</a>). But publishers could go further and display metadata pertaining to the editorial checks they have performed on a paper. So Crossmark could tell readers that the paper has been checked for plagiarism, or figure manipulation, or reporting standards such as CONSORT or ARRIVE guidelines. Here at Research Square we have been addressing this with a series of <a href="https://www.researchsquare.com/publishers/badges">Editorial Badges</a> that publishers can apply to their papers to demonstrate what checks have been performed.</p>
<p>Together, these implementations would provide value to the reader, who can see exactly what has been checked, and to the publisher, who can show how rigorous their editorial processes are. It would also serve to highlight the integrity of the authors who have passed all of these checks.</p>
<p>Research integrity is not something that can be easily measured but, unlike wit or charm, it is something that people generally know that they have.* This means that they just need to be transparent in their output to demonstrate this to the world. Metadata provides a simple way of doing this, so researchers and publishers should make sure they provide it as openly as they can.</p>
<p>*<em>with apologies to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Lee">Laurie Lee</a> for the mangled quote</em></p>Dr. Livingstone, I presume…a two month expedition deep into the heart of research publishinghttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/dr.-livingstone-i-presumea-two-month-expedition-deep-into-the-heart-of-research-publishing/
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000Amanda Bartellhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/dr.-livingstone-i-presumea-two-month-expedition-deep-into-the-heart-of-research-publishing/<p>Hello there. I&rsquo;m <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/amanda-bartell/">Amanda Bartell</a>, and I joined the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/org-chart/">Crossref team</a> in mid-October as the new Head of Member Experience. My new Member Experience team will be responsible for metadata users as well as members, onboarding new accounts, supporting existing ones, and making sure that everyone can make the most of Crossref services - an an easy and efficient way. I have spent the last couple of months exploring the world of academic publishing and what our members need - and it&rsquo;s been fascinating!</p>
<h2 id="expedition-members">Expedition members</h2>
<p>The new Member Experience team is made up of some people who are new to Crossref and Scholarly Publishing and some whose names you&rsquo;ll probably recognize!</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/anna-tolwinska/">Anna Tolwinska</a> (Member Experience Manager) will support existing members in understanding the quality of metadata they deposit with us, and how they can best make use of our other products and services.</li>
<li><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/paul-davis/">Paul Davis</a> (Product Support Specialist) and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/shayn-smulyan/">Shayn Smulyan</a> (Product Support Associate) will continue to provide excellent technical support to all creators and consumers of our metadata.</li>
<li><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/gurjit-bhullar/">Gurjit Bhullar</a> (Membership Coordinator) will help new applicants who want to join Crossref understand the member obligations and have a smooth induction journey.</li>
</ul>
<p>We&rsquo;ll be expanding the team in 2018 to support you further - <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/status-i-am-new/">watch this space!</a></p>
<h2 id="what-a-diverse-ecosystem">What a diverse ecosystem</h2>
<p>My background is educational publishing, so this has been my first foray into the world of scholarly publishing. In my first few months I&rsquo;ve been lucky enough to attend three very different events with Crossref - Frankfurt Book Fair, our annual meeting (<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual/">LIVE17</a>) in Singapore, and an OpenCon event in Oxford. Each one has given me the chance to talk to our members and other constituents, and I&rsquo;ve been really struck by what a diverse bunch you are: from small volunteer-led society journals through universities to commercial behemoths; from Albania to Zambia (and 125 countries in between); covering everything from Ancient History to X-Ray Spectrometry.</p>
<h2 id="expedition-equipment-to-suit-the-climate">Expedition equipment to suit the climate</h2>
<p>This diversity gives my team a huge responsibility. We need to make sure that the support we provide to you can meet the needs of everyone - whether you&rsquo;re a multinational publisher with a large team of xml specialists, or a small team of enthusiastic academics. Everyone should be able to clearly understand and take advantage of what Crossref offers both to you as an organization and to the wider scholarly community.</p>
<p>With this in mind, we&rsquo;re going to be making a few changes to the support materials we provide over the next 12 months&mdash;rewriting them so they&rsquo;re clearer for everyone, re-structuring our support center so there&rsquo;s a separate route through depending on your level of technical expertise and closer links with our main website, plus providing support in different languages and different formats.</p>
<h2 id="sticking-together-in-a-harsh-environment">Sticking together in a harsh environment</h2>
<p>As someone who has previously worked in commercial publishing, something else that has struck me about working in a member organization is the difference between members and traditional &ldquo;customers&rdquo;. It&rsquo;s been fantastic to see how involved many of you are in Crossref. From taking part in our various committees and working groups, to helping to organize <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">LIVE Local events</a>, to attending webinars and training, it&rsquo;s obvious that you feel a real sense of ownership over Crossref and our shared mission.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;re hoping to make use of that great sense of community in 2018 by improving our member center, giving you more access to see the level of metadata you&rsquo;re sharing with the community (and that others are sharing) and providing more options for you to communicate with, and support each other. We&rsquo;re also going to be improving the education we offer for new members, to make sure that everyone is aware of the joint mission we all have to improve research communications. Most long time members know it&rsquo;s so much more than just having a DOI, and we need to make sure that our new members are aware of this too and share our vision.</p>
<h2 id="leaving-no-one-behind">Leaving no-one behind</h2>
<p>We have a lot of plans for the Member Experience team in 2018, but it&rsquo;s key that everything we do meets the needs of all our members. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve your member experience, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org?subject=Member Experience suggestion">do let me know</a>.</p>Global Persistent Identifiers for grants, awards, and facilitieshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000Geoffrey Bilderhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/<p>Crossref&rsquo;s <a href="https://github.com/Crossref/open-funder-registry">Open Funder Registry</a> (neé FundRef) now includes over 15 thousand entries. Crossref has over 2 million metadata records that include funding information - 1.7 million of which include an Open Funder Identifier. The uptake of funder identifiers is already making it easier and more efficient for the scholarly community to directly link funding to research outputs, but lately we&rsquo;ve been hearing from a number of people that the time is ripe for a global grant identifier as well.</p>
<p>To that end, Crossref convened its <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/funders/">funder advisory group</a> along with representatives from our collaborator organizations, ORCID and DataCite, to explore the creation of a global grant identifier system.</p>
<p>We thought you might like to know about what we&rsquo;ve been discussing&hellip;</p>
<h3 id="the-first-rule-of-grant-identifiers">The First Rule of Grant Identifiers</h3>
<p>The first rule of grant identifiers is that they probably should not be called &ldquo;grant identifiers&rdquo;. Research is supported in a variety of ways&mdash;through grants, endowments, secondments, loans, use of facilities/equipment and even crowd-funding. In any of these cases, it is important to be able to link researchers and research outputs to details about the sources of support. This is true for prosaic reasons&mdash;to understand ROI, to map the competitive landscape, to ensure that mandates are fulfilled, to avoid double payment. But it is also true for epistemic reasons; understanding how research was funded can help contextualise that research, and help expose potential conflicts of interest or specific agendas.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/funder-registry/">Open Funder Registry</a> which provides a coarse mapping between research outputs and funders, but it is becoming clear that we need more fine-grained mapping directly to information about the kind of support that was provided.</p>
<p>Awkwardly, none of us had any great ideas about alternative nomenclature, so we&rsquo;ve made the eminently practical decision to continue to use the term &ldquo;grant identifier&rdquo; whilst being aware that our aim is to define a system that applies more broadly to any form of funding or support of research. So <code>+1</code> for practicality.</p>
<h3 id="why-do-we-need-an-open-global-grant-identifier">Why do we need an open, global, grant identifier?</h3>
<p>With the steady increase in research outputs, and the growing number of active researchers from both academia and industry, research stakeholders find they need to be able to automate workflows in order to scale their systems efficiently. Funders want to be able to track the outputs that arise from research they have funded. As a result, institutions find themselves having to regularly analyse and summarise the research their faculty produces. Faculty, in turn, face increasing accounting bureaucracy in order to meet all the reporting requirements that are cascading through the system. And finally, publishers are seeking to make the manuscript submission and evaluation process more efficient as well as to increase the discoverability and contextual richness of their publications.</p>
<p>Most funders already have local, internal grant identifiers. But there are over 15K funders currently listed in the aforementioned Open Funder Registry. The problem is that each funder has its own identifier scheme and (sometimes) API. It is very difficult for third parties to integrate with so many different systems. Open, global, persistent and machine-actionable identifiers are key to scaling these activities.</p>
<p>We already have a sophisticated open, global, interoperable infrastructure of persistent identifier systems for some key elements of scholarly communications. We have persistent identifiers for researchers and contributors (ORCID iDs), for data and software (DataCite DOIs), for journal articles, preprints, conference proceedings, peer reviews, monographs and standards (Crossref DOIs), and for Funders (Open Funder Registry IDs).</p>
<p>And there are similar systems under active development for <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/categories/organization-identifier/">research organizations</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/taking-the-con-out-of-conferences/">conferences, projects</a> and <a href="https://scicrunch.org/resources">resources</a> reported in the biomedical literature (e.g. antibodies, model organisms). At a minimum, open, persistent identifiers address the inherent difficulty in disambiguating entities based on textual strings (structured or otherwise). This precision, in turn, allows automated cross-walking of linked identifiers through APIs and metadata which enable advanced applications.</p>
<p>For example, the use of identifiers can simplify user interfaces and save users time. Almost everybody in scholarly communications spends a frustrating portion of their lives copying information from one system to another. This process is not just tedious, it is also error-prone. But we are increasingly seeing systems make use of identifiers to eliminate the need for a lot of this manual copying. For example, researchers using an ORCID iD when they submit a manuscript can start to expect that their relevant ORCID biographical data will simply be imported into the manuscript tracking system so that it doesn&rsquo;t have to be manually copied over. And if said researcher has their manuscript accepted, they can also expect that their ORCID record will automatically be updated with the publication information and that their institution and/or their funder can be automatically notified of the impending publication so that relevant repositories and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_research_information_system">CRIS</a> systems can be populated automatically.</p>
<p>Additionally, there is a growing list of services that have been built on top of these standard identifiers. Profile systems (e.g. VIVO, Impact Story, Kudos) can automatically retrieve the latest information from a researcher&rsquo;s ORCID record. Bibliographic management tools (EasyBib, Zotero, Papers) allow researchers to cite content with the latest metadata. And similarity checking services can harvest and index the latest scholarly literature for inclusion in the tools they have developed for detecting plagiarism and fraud. Funder identifiers are already playing an important role in this metadata workflow. As of November 2017, there are 1.7 million Crossref publication DOIs that are explicitly linked to an Open Funder Registry ID. These linkages serve as a foundation for initiatives like SHARE, CHORUS, and the Jisc Publications Router. But there are another 1+ million records that have funding information without an associated ID and, of course, 90+ million records that have no funding information at all.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So If we have global funder identifiers and they are already working, why do we need global grant identifiers as well? Don&rsquo;t we just need to increase uptake of funder identifiers? How will grant identifiers help?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>First, global grant identifiers could greatly reduce the UX complexity of gathering funder information. This, in turn, would boost the collection of funding information from researchers and ensure that the information that they provide to publishers, institutions and other funders is accurate and complete.</p>
<p>Second, the introduction of global grant identifiers would further increase the utility of links between research outputs and funding information. A grant identifier provides more granular information about the funding. Instead of just linking to information about the funder, a grant identifier would allow linking research outputs to particular research programs along with the information relating to those programs, such as grant durations, award amounts, etc. It would also allow analysis of relationships between multiple co-funding bodies.</p>
<h3 id="to-doi-or-not-to-doi">To DOI or not to DOI?</h3>
<p>Clearly, we think DOIs are pretty good things. But we also aren&rsquo;t zealots. Sometimes DOIs are appropriate and sometimes they are not. For example, we were instrumental in <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1awd6PPguRAdZsC6CKpFSSSu1dulliT8E3kHwIJ3tD5o/edit?usp=sharing">defining the structure of the ORCID identifier</a> and, in that case, we decided that DOIs were not appropriate.</p>
<p>But in the case of a global grant identifier system, we think there are a number of reasons adopting DOIs would be useful:</p>
<ol>
<li>It is easy to &ldquo;overlay&rdquo; the global DOI system onto existing local identifier systems. An organization does not need to abandon their internal identifier scheme in order to use DOIs. They can instead incorporate their local scheme into the DOI structure via the simple mechanism of prepending their existing identifiers with an assigned DOI prefix and registering relevant metadata with a DOI registration agency like Crossref or DataCite.</li>
<li>DOI links are &ldquo;persist-able&rdquo;. That is they can resolve to different online locations even if domain names change and/or the DNS system itself is replaced. This characteristic is important for a grant identifier because funding agencies - particularly government funding agencies - tend to undergo frequent reorganisations (e.g. splitting, merging, restructuring) and renaming. An indirectly resolvable identifier like a DOI (or ARK, Handle, etc.) is critical to ensure the long-term integrity of identifiers in these situations.</li>
<li>There are 15K+ funders currently listed in the Open funder Registry. Each has their own grant identifier scheme and different levels of technical support for them (APIs, etc.). This makes it very difficult for 3rd parties to build tools that work &ldquo;generically&rdquo; with grant identifiers. But once a local identifier scheme had been &ldquo;globalised&rdquo; by making it a DOI, third parties can build tools without having to worry about the differences between individual funder systems.</li>
<li>Crossref and DataCite DOIs are deeply embedded in the tools and workflows of scholarly communications. Manuscript tracking systems, bibliographic management systems, metrics systems, CRIS systems, profile systems, etc. often have built-in mechanisms for consuming and making use of DOIs and their associated metadata.</li>
<li>Crossref and DataCite DOIs are cross-disciplinary. They are used in the humanities, social sciences, sciences and in a host of communities that frequently interact with the scholarly literature for example- NGOs, IGOs, patent systems, and standards bodies.</li>
<li>Crossref and DataCite provide a variety of APIs (e.g. REST, OAI-PMH) and services (e.g. search, Crossmark, Similarity Check, Scholix) built around DOIs.</li>
<li>DOI&rsquo;s have a useful characteristic, which is that the &ldquo;prefix&rdquo; of a DOI can be used to determine who originally created the record with which the DOI is associated. In the case of grant identifiers, this means that the prefix of a DOI-based grant identifier could be used to automatically determine the correct funder responsible for the initial grant. This means that the UIs for entering funder/grant information could be both simplified and made more robust&mdash;which would likely increase the number of parties that collect and propagate id-based funder information.</li>
</ol>
<p>But the use of DOIs as the basis for grant identifiers also introduces some potential barriers to adopting a standard funding identifier. For example:</p>
<ul>
<li>Funders would need to be able to join a suitable DOI registration agency (e.g. Crossref, DataCite). Some funders (e.g. government agencies) may be restricted in their ability to &ldquo;join&rdquo; external organizations.</li>
<li>Funders would need to be able to create new DOIs and register associated metadata with their chosen registration agency in a timely manner. Some funders may be unable to generate metadata or may not have the technical capacity to automatically register metadata.</li>
<li>Funders would need to be able to provide an openly available (e.g. not behind access control) online resource to which the DOI would resolve. For example, a landing page describing the grant or a digital copy of the grant itself. Again, some funders may face technical barriers to providing an online resource to resolve to. In other cases there may be privacy or security reasons for not providing an open resource to which a DOI can resolve.</li>
</ul>
<p>Still, the advisory group consensus has been that these barriers are generally surmountable. Most of the questions they had revolved around understanding what a DOI-based workflow would look like from the funder&rsquo;s perspective, and so we outlined the steps a funder would need to take in order to adopt DOI-based global identifiers.</p>
<h3 id="the-doi-based-grant-identifiers-workflow">The DOI-based grant identifiers workflow</h3>
<p>A funder registering metadata and creating DOIs for grants would need to support the following workflow:</p>
<ol>
<li>When a grant is submitted, the funder would assign their own internal identifier for tracking, etc. For example <code>00-00-05-67-89</code>.</li>
<li>If the grant is accepted, the funder would:
<ul>
<li>generate a global public identifier for the grant based on the DOI. For example, assuming their prefix was <code>10.4440</code>, then the global public identifier might become <code>https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.4440/00-00-05-67-89</code>.</li>
<li>create a &ldquo;landing page&rdquo; on their website (or wherever they make their grants available online) to which the global public identifier will resolve. The landing page would display a TBD set of metadata describing the grant, as well as a link to the grant itself.</li>
<li>register the generated DOI and a TBD set of metadata with their registration agency (RA) (e.g. Crossref or DataCite). This metadata would include the URL of the landing page defined above.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Once metadata and DOIs are registered with an RA, the funder would have a series of ongoing obligations:
<ul>
<li>Update locations: If the location of the landing page changes (for example, because of a site restructuring, merger of split of the funding organization, etc.), the funder would need to update their metadata records to point the DOI to the new location.</li>
<li>Update metadata: If metadata becomes out-of-date (e.g. the status of a grant changes, additional grant-related metadata is added, etc.), the funder would update the relevant records.</li>
<li>Promote the use of the the DOI as the preferred global, public identifier for the grant. That is - the one that people should use when referring to or citing the grant (the funder can continue to use the original local identifier for their internal systems, etc.). </li>
</ul></li>
</ol>
<p>Again, the advisory group thought that this workflow seemed tractable and agreed that the best way to ensure that would be to proceed to creating a working pilot of a global grant identifier system based on the DOI.</p>
<h3 id="next-steps">Next steps</h3>
<p>Crossref is starting a grant identifier pilot. We will create two sub-groups of the funder advisory group.</p>
<h4 id="group-for-governance-membership-and-fees">Group for &ldquo;Governance, membership, and fees&rdquo;</h4>
<p>This group will look at governance and financial issues raised by the introduction of grant identifiers. For example, it will look at whether Crossref&rsquo;s membership model works as is or might need to be adjusted in order to accommodate a new constituency. We know, for example, that some funders find it hard to become &ldquo;members&rdquo; of organizations. We might need to create other participation categories in order to accommodate these restrictions. Similarly the group will look design a pricing model of DOIs for grants in order to make sure that they cover the costs of modifying and sustaining the system for them, as well as to ensure that the pricing incentivises funders to participate. This sub-group will work closely with Crossref&rsquo;s membership and fees committee.</p>
<h4 id="group-for-technical-and-metadata">Group for &ldquo;Technical and metadata&rdquo;</h4>
<p>This group will look at any technical changes that need to be made to registration process in order to accommodate the new participants. If there are, they are likely to center around specific metadata requirements for grants. As such, the group will likely spend most of its time agreeing to a practical metadata schema for capturing relevant information about the myriad of ways in which organizations <em>support</em> research. This group will also liaise with other relevant technical working groups, such as those who are looking at organizational identifiers and conference identifiers.</p>
<p>The two sub-groups will first meet in January and, after a few meetings, will report back the advisory group with recommendations. Using these recommendations, we will develop an implementation plan which will include testing the infrastructure, testing metadata deposits, fee modelling, etc, with a small group of participants.</p>
<p>If you are a funder, and you would like to have somebody from your origanization participate in one of these working groups, please <a href="mailto:ginny@crossref.org">contact Ginny Hendricks</a>. Note that joining the above groups does not commit you to anything other than engaging in the discussion. We want to make sure we create a system that works for a range of funders, not just those who can start testing something right away.</p>And our survey says...https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/and-our-survey-says.../
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/and-our-survey-says.../<p>Earlier this year we sent out a short survey inviting members to rate our performance. We asked what you think we do well, what we don’t do so well, and one thing we could do to improve our rating.</p>
<p>We were delighted to receive 313 responses and relieved that 93% of those were positive (phew!). It was very useful to hear your thoughts and to get such a variety of comments covering Product, Outreach, Marketing and Member Experience. There were a few recurring themes, three of which we’d like to address here:</p>
<h2 id="1-providing-information-in-different-languages">1. Providing information in different languages</h2>
<p>Not surprisingly, given the growing diversity of our member base, some respondents asked us to share information in languages other than English. We have been aware of this growing need for some time and have been working on a few developments in this area:</p>
<ul>
<li>In January 2018 we will be launching a series of seven service videos in six different languages—French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.</li>
<li>January also sees the launch of a new initiative called the Ambassador Program. Ambassadors will work closely with Crossref to help spread the word about our services, and support our global members in their own languages.</li>
<li>During 2017 we hosted two webinars in Brazilian Portuguese and one in Turkish, and aim to increase this in 2018.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="2-member-to-member-discussion-forum">2. Member-to-member discussion forum</h2>
<p>Some respondents asked for a facility to enable members to reach out to each other, giving direct opportunity for discussions and/or sharing experiences online (and in their own languages). We have been working for a few months now to provide a member-to-member discussion area, which is planned for 2018. Following a soft launch covering a few areas/topics, we’ll broaden the scope to include technical support, too.</p>
<h2 id="3-registering-metadata-more-easily-using-the-web-deposit-form">3. Registering metadata more easily using the web deposit form</h2>
<p>Many respondents requested a more user-friendly process for registering metadata through our webform. Our Product and DevOps teams have been working on this for some time and have created a new interface called the Metadata Manager, which is currently in Beta but scheduled to launch in Q1 of 2018.</p>
<p>Finally, we’d like to thank you for participating in our survey. Your valuable feedback and suggestions help us understand your experience, improve our service, shape the course of particular projects and even direct our future strategy.</p>
<p><em>As this survey was anonymous, we are unable to respond to anyone on an individual basis, however, if you’d like to have your particular comments addressed, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">we would love to hear from you directly.</a></em></p>Working with universities at Crossref LIVE Yogyakartahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/working-with-universities-at-crossref-live-yogyakarta/
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/working-with-universities-at-crossref-live-yogyakarta/<p>Following on from our LIVE Annual Meeting in Singapore, my colleague, Susan Collins, and I held a local LIVE event in Yogyakarta thanks to support from Universitas Ahmad Dahlan (UAD), Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo and one of Crossref&rsquo;s new Sponsoring Affiliates, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia.</p>
<p>Over the past two years, we&rsquo;ve seen accelerated growth in our membership in Asia Pacific (making up a quarter of all new members in the last two years). A lot of those new members have come from Indonesia, so it was great to have the opportunity to meet up, answer questions and to share knowledge between all our different organizations.</p>
<div class="align-right">
<span><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2017/yogyakarta-blog.jpg" alt="graph of number of new members per region" width="250px"/></span>
</div>
<p>We welcomed speakers such as Dr. Muhammad Dimyati, from the Directorate General of Strengthening for Research and Development, Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education. Dr. Dimyati talked about the importance of Indonesian research and presented statistics on its growth, but also its coverage in different databases like Scopus and DOAJ.</p>
<p>Dr. Lukman from LIPI, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences also joined us to explain the importance of identifiers within the research ecosystem. As any identifier buff will know, we&rsquo;re keen to talk more about how organizations are using Crossref metadata and identifiers, and the importance of providing good, complete metadata (<a href="http://www.metadata2020.org/">Metadata2020</a>) so this, plus a remote presentation from Nobuko Miyari from <a href="https://orcid.org/">ORCID</a> helped provide great context for the day.</p>
<p>Metadata and identifiers are of course just one part of the process, and Mr. Tole Sutikno from UAD gave an overview of good practice publishing by looking at some of the wider issues that journal editors (and researchers) need to know.</p>
<p>We had time in the afternoon to talk to our audience about Crossref - our different services, OJS integrations, funding data and our APIs, and thanks to our moderators we were able to take lots of questions from members who had specific questions about Crossmark, Cited-by and depositing references.</p>
<div class="align-right">
<span><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2017/yogyakarta2-blog.jpg" alt="image of stage" width="250px" /></span>
</div>
<p>A few weeks later, and I&rsquo;m still absorbing all of the things that happened on our (too) quick trip to Yogyakarta.</p>
<p>Thanks again to our members and hosts for attending the event and sharing their questions, ideas and plans with us, and we plan to come back to continue to build on these in future.</p>The PIDapalooza lineup is out; come rock out with us at the open festival of persistent identifiershttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-pidapalooza-lineup-is-out-come-rock-out-with-us-at-the-open-festival-of-persistent-identifiers/
Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-pidapalooza-lineup-is-out-come-rock-out-with-us-at-the-open-festival-of-persistent-identifiers/<p>PIDs&rsquo;R&rsquo;Us and if they&rsquo;re you, too, please join us for the second <a href="https://pidapalooza.org/">PIDapalooza</a>, in Girona, Spain on January 23-24, for a two-day celebration of persistent identifiers.</p>
<p>Together, we will achieve the incredible - make a meeting about persistent identifiers and networked research fun! Brought to you by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, this year&rsquo;s <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/">sessions</a> are organized around eight themes:</p>
<ul>
<li>PID myths</li>
<li>Achieving persistence</li>
<li>PIDs for emerging uses</li>
<li>Legacy PIDs</li>
<li>Bridging worlds</li>
<li>PIDagogy</li>
<li>PID stories</li>
<li>Kinds of persistence</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="the-program-https-pidapalooza18-sched-com-is-now-final-and-there-really-is-something-for-everyone-well-every-pid-geek">The <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/">program</a> is now final and there really is something for everyone (well, every PID geek)</h3>
<ul>
<li>Hmm, <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/Cwmj/do-researchers-need-to-care-about-pid-systems">Do Researchers Need to Care about PID Systems?</a> Excellent question.</li>
<li>We&rsquo;ll hear <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/Cwml/stories-from-the-pid-roadies-scholix">Stories from the PID Roadies: Scholix</a>.</li>
<li>Nevermind the <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/CwnA/the-bollockschain-and-other-pid-hallucinations">The Bollockschain and other PID Hallucinations</a>.</li>
<li>An intriguing session on <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/Cwmk/resinfocitizenshipis#">#ResInfoCitizenshipIs?</a>.</li>
<li>There will be a plenary by <a href="http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1611-6935">Johanna McEntyre</a> on <a href="https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/CwnI/as-a-biologist-i-want-to-reuse-and-remix-data-so-that-i-can-do-my-research">As a <code>biologist</code> I want to <code>reuse and remix data</code> so that I can <code>do my research</code></a>.</li>
<li>And we&rsquo;ll enjoy another plenary from <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9114-8737">Melissa Haendel</a> (title to be confirmed).</li>
</ul>
<p>With half the places already booked, now&rsquo;s the time to <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pidapalooza-2018-registration-35176831851">register</a> and plan your trip. We hope to see fellow festival-goers there for some PIDtastic party time (and actually some epic serious conversations).</p>
<p>Contact me via the steering committee at <a href="mailto:pidapalooza@datacite.org">PIDapalooza@datacite.org</a> with any questions, music requests, or backstage passes.</p>
<h3 id="full-lineup">Full lineup</h3>
<p><a id="sched-embed" href="http://pidapalooza18.sched.com/">View the Crossref LIVE17 agenda.</a><script type="text/javascript" src="//pidapalooza18.sched.com/js/embed.js"></script></p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 7 (with CHORUS)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-7-with-chorus/
Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-7-with-chorus/<p>Continuing our <a href="https://crossref.org/categories/api-case-study/">blog series</a> highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Sara Girard and Howard Ratner at <a href="http://www.chorusaccess.org">CHORUS</a> about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.</p>
<h3 id="introducing-chorus">Introducing CHORUS</h3>
<p>CHORUS (<a href="http://www.chorusaccess.org">www.chorusaccess.org</a>) is an innovative non-profit organization that supports funders, publishers, authors and institutions to deliver public access to articles reporting on funded research. Our vision is to create a future where the output flowing from funded research is easily and permanently discoverable, accessible and verifiable by anyone in the world.</p>
<p>CHORUS currently monitors over 400,000 articles for more than 20 US federal and two international funding agencies, and has partnerships with Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Office of the Director National of Intelligence: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Smithsonian Institution, US Department of Agriculture, US Geological Survey, Japan Science and Technology Agency, and the Australian Research Council. CHORUS is supported by over 50 publisher and affiliate members who represent the majority of funded published research.</p>
<p><img align=right" src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/chorus-blog.png" width="700" alt="mage of interaction of platforms" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<h3 id="what-problem-is-your-service-trying-to-solve">What problem is your service trying to solve?</h3>
<p>CHORUS is the first service of CHOR Inc., founded in 2013 in response to the directive of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for all US federal research agencies to develop and implement plans to widen public access to publications and data associated with federally funded research.</p>
<p>CHORUS aims to minimize public access compliance burdens and ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of articles reporting on funded research. We provide the necessary metadata infrastructure and governance to enable a smooth, low-friction interface between funders, authors, institutions and publishers in a distributed network environment. CHORUS’ services track public accessibility of articles regardless of whether they are published Gold OA or made open by the publisher.</p>
<h3 id="can-you-tell-us-how-you-are-using-the-crossref-rest-api-at-chorus">Can you tell us how you are using the Crossref REST API at CHORUS?</h3>
<p>The Crossref REST API is a key source for the metadata database that powers the CHORUS Dashboard, Search and Reporting services for Funders, Institutions and Publishers.</p>
<h3 id="what-metadata-values-do-you-pull-from-the-api">What metadata values do you pull from the API?</h3>
<p>We pull the basic bibliographic information such as publisher, journal title, article title, authors and publication date. Perhaps even more important to our area of focus are the funder, grant and license information.</p>
<h3 id="how-often-do-you-extract-query-data">How often do you extract/query data?</h3>
<p>CHORUS uses the Crossref REST API every day.</p>
<h3 id="can-you-describe-your-workflow-using-crossref-metadata">Can you describe your workflow using Crossref metadata?</h3>
<div style="float:left;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/chorus2-blog.png" width="600" alt="mage of interaction of platforms" class="img-responsive"/>
</div>
<p>Every night we query the Crossref API to send us metadata for all article or conference proceeding records for our member publishers that have funder metadata matching the funders monitored by CHORUS.</p>
<p>CHORUS monitors these DOIs for public accessibility on publisher websites; inclusion in agency search tools; deposit in a growing list of funder repositories (e.g.,<a href="https://www.osti.gov/pages/">US DOE PAGES</a>,<a href="https://par.nsf.gov/">NSF PAR</a>, and <a href="https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/">USGS Publications Warehouse</a> and <a href="https://0-www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.libus.csd.mu.edu/pmc/">NIH PubMed Central</a>); and for associated ORCID researcher records. CHORUS also uses the reuse license metadata to identify when an article is expected to be made publicly accessible.</p>
<p>Finally, we check for ingestion in <a href="http://www.clockss.org">CLOCKSS</a> and/or <a href="http://0-www.portico.org.libus.csd.mu.edu">Portico</a> to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility of research findings reported in journal and proceedings articles. Our preservation partners keep the full text in their dark archives, only making it available when the content may no longer be made publicly accessible by the publisher.</p>
<p>The collected and enhanced metadata is presented in our dashboard, search and reporting services all including links back to the publisher sites via the Crossref DOI.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-the-future-plans-for-chorus">What are the future plans for CHORUS?</h3>
<p>Following the success of our Funder and Publisher Dashboards, CHORUS is expanding the services we provide to international funders, non-governmental funders, and institutions. Our first funder partnership outside of the United States is with the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). CHORUS announced its new Institution Dashboard service this Autumn after successfully concluding pilots with the University of Florida and University of Denver. CHORUS will also be adding links to relevant datasets and other metadata utilizing forthcoming identifiers and metadata standards.</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-you-like-to-see-the-rest-api-offer">What else would you like to see the REST API offer</h3>
<p>It would be great to see more identification of funders from Crossref members. While we have seen great leaps since 2013, we all have a long way to go. We are also eager to see Crossref incorporate the Organization Identifiers that they have begun with ORCID, DataCite and others.</p>
<hr />
<p>Thanks, CHORUS! If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>The research nexus - better research through better metadatahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus-better-research-through-better-metadata/
Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-research-nexus-better-research-through-better-metadata/<p>Researchers are adopting new tools that create consistency and shareability in their experimental methods. Increasingly, these are viewed as key components in driving reproducibility and replicability. They provide transparency in reporting key methodological and analytical information. They are also used for sharing the artifacts which make up a processing trail for the results: data, material, analytical code, and related software on which the conclusions of the paper rely. Where expert feedback was also shared, such reviews further enrich this record. We capture these ideas and build on the notion of the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-article-nexus-linking-publications-to-associated-research-outputs/">“article nexus” blogpost</a> with a new variation: &ldquo;the research nexus.&rdquo;</p>
<div style="float:left;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Article_Nexus_Reproducibility.png" width="400" alt="article nexus for reproducibility" class="img-responsive"/>
</div>
<p>Some of Crossref’s publishing community are encouraging the scholarly communication practices surrounding these tools in a variety of ways: incorporating them into the publishing workflow, integrations between the tools and publishing systems, as well as linking and exposing the artifacts in the publications for readers to access. A special set of publishers have gone all the way and included these links into their Crossref metadata record. They insert them directly into the metadata deposit when they register the content (<a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426-Relationships-between-DOIs-and-other-objects">technical documentation</a>). Doing so, these connections reach further than the publisher platform and propagate to systems across the research ecosystem including places like indexers, research information management systems, sharing platforms (oh, the list goes on!). We highlight a small set of examples to illustrate how these outstanding publishing practices are supporting good research.</p>
<h3 id="1-linking-to-an-entire-collection-of-methods">1. Linking to an entire collection of methods</h3>
<p>Crossref member, Protocols.io, is supporting transparency and methods reproducibility with their open access repository of science methods. Leitão-Goncalves R, Carvalho-Santos Z,
Francisco AP, et al. investigated the concerted action of the commensal bacteria Acetobacter pomorum and Lactobacilli in Drosophila melanogaster, demonstrating how the interaction of specific nutrients within the microbiome can shape behavioral decisions and life history traits. Findings were published in PLOS Biology earlier this year: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1371/journal.pbio.2000862">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1371/journal.pbio.2000862</a>. Authors deposited detailed methods and protocols used in the project (Drosophila rearing, media preparations, and microbial manipulations) as a collection in Protocols.io: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.17504/protocols.io.hdtb26n">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.17504/protocols.io.hdtb26n</a>. So Protocols.io registered their content with us, linking the protocol to the paper. This creates the crosswalk between both so that users can get from one to the other through the metadata. The full metadata record can be found <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.17504/protocols.io.hdtb26n">here</a>.</p>
<h3 id="2-linking-to-video-protocol">2. Linking to video protocol</h3>
<p>If a picture is worth a thousand words, the truism might apply to moving pictures many times over. Fasel B, Spörri J, Schütz P, et al. proposed a set of calibration movements optimized for alpine skiing and validated the 3D joint angles of the knee, hip, and trunk during alpine skiing in a PLOS ONE paper: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0181446">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0181446</a>. These movements consisted of squats, trunk rotations, hip ad/abductions, and upright standing. The specific team responsible for designing them (Fasel B, Spörri J, Kröll J, and Aminian K) described the set of calibration movements performed but found videos to be a far more effective way to communicate the technical movements used in their study. They made the visuals available too: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.17504/protocols.io.itrcem6">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.17504/protocols.io.itrcem6</a>. So Protocols.io deposited the link between video protocol and paper to the Crossref metadata record (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.17504/protocols.io.itrcem6">full metadata record</a>).</p>
<h3 id="3-linking-to-software-and-peer-reviews">3. Linking to software and peer reviews</h3>
<p>The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is an academic journal about high quality research software across broadly diverse disciplines. Sara Mahar works on the effectiveness of organizations funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to combat homelessness. She collaborated with computational physicist Matthew Bellis to create a python tool for researchers to visualize and analyze data from the Homeless Management Information System:<a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.21105/joss.00384">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.21105/joss.00384</a>. The software was archived in Zenodo: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5281/zenodo.13750">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5281/zenodo.13750</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/384">peer review artifacts</a> were also published. JOSS deposited all these links in the metadata record (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.21105/joss.00384">found here</a>).</p>
<h3 id="4-linking-to-preprint-data-code-source-code-peer-reviews">4. Linking to preprint, data, code, source code, peer reviews</h3>
<p>Gigascience, published by Oxford University Press, is experimenting with a number of new tools in their mission to promote reproducibility of analyses and data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. In a recent paper Luo R, Schatz M, and Salzberg S shared the results of the firstly publicly available implementation of variant calling using a 16-genotype probabilistic model for germline variant detection: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1093/gigascience/gix045">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1093/gigascience/gix045</a>. Prior to formal peer review, the group posted the preprint in bioRxiv: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/111393">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/111393</a>. When the paper was published, the authors made the supporting data available, including snapshots of the test and result data, in a public repository: <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/100316">http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/100316</a>. OUP included this data citation in their Crossref metadata record via the routes recommended in our previous blog post about depositing data citations (<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citations/">https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citations/</a>). The researchers made the <a href="https://github.com/aquaskyline/16GT">code available in Github</a>, and the algorithm is ready for researchers to run on Code Ocean, a cloud-based computational reproducibility platform that allows researchers to wrap and encapsulate the data, code, and computation environment linked to an article: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.24433/CO.0a812d9b-0ff3-4eb7-825f-76d3cd049a43">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.24433/CO.0a812d9b-0ff3-4eb7-825f-76d3cd049a43</a>. For further transparency, expert reviews of the manuscript from the peer review history were published in Publons: <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100737">http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100737</a> and <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100738">http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100738</a>. (As of last month, publishers can <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/peer-reviews-are-open-for-registering-at-crossref/">register peer reviews at Crossref</a>). The <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.1093/gigascience/gix045">full metadata record</a> contains links to the entire set of materials listed above.</p>
<h3 id="5-linking-to-preprint-code-docker-hub-video-reviews">5. Linking to preprint, Code, Docker hub, video, reviews</h3>
<p>Narechania A, Baker R, DeSalle R, et al. used bird flocking behavior to design an algorithm, Clusterflock, for optimizing distance-based clusters in orthologous gene families that share an evolutionary history. Their paper was published in Gigascience last year: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1186/s13742-016-0152-3">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1186/s13742-016-0152-3</a>. Supporting data, code snapshots and video were published in GigaDB: <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/100247">http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/100247</a>. Code was maintained in <a href="https://github.com/narechan/clusterflock">GitHub</a>. And authors also created a Docker application for Clusterflock, a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of the software which includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings (<a href="https://hub.docker.com/r/narechan/clusterflock-0.1/">Docker Hub link here</a>). They created a <a href="https://youtu.be/ELZTVOiqKn8">video demo</a> of the algorithm. Publons reviews were published <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100507">http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100507</a> and <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100508">http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5524/review.100508</a>.
Gigascience shared all these assets in their publication, including the link to the original bioRxiv preprint: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/25/045773">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/25/045773</a>). The full metadata record containing these links can be found <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/10.1186/s13742-016-0152-3">here</a>.</p>
<h3 id="the-research-nexus-better-research-through-better-metadata">The Research Nexus: better research through better metadata</h3>
<p>These five are just a few exemplary cases showing how publishers are declaring the relationships between their publications and other associated artifacts to support reproducibility and discoverability of their content. We welcome you to check out our <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426-Relationships-between-DOIs-and-other-objects">overview of relationships between DOIs and other materials</a> for more information. Members who are enriching your publishing pipeline in similar ways, please register these links to make your reach go further. We also welcome everyone to retrieve these relations in our REST API (<a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc">technical documentation</a>).</p>A transparent record of life after publicationhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-transparent-record-of-life-after-publication/
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000Madeleine Watsonhttps://www.crossref.org/blog/a-transparent-record-of-life-after-publication/
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/header_image.jpeg" alt="image chess pawn pieces" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<h2 id="crossref-event-data-and-the-importance-of-understanding-what-lies-beneath-the-data">Crossref Event Data and the importance of understanding what lies beneath the data.</h2>
<p>Some things in life are better left a mystery. There is an argument for opaqueness when the act of full disclosure only limits your level of enjoyment: in my case, I need a complete lack of transparency to enjoy both chicken nuggets and David Lynch films. And that works for me. But metrics are not nuggets. Because in order to consume them, you really need to know how they’re made. Knowing the provenance of data, along with the context with which it was derived, provides everyone with the best chance of creating indicators which are fit for purpose. This is just one of the reasons why we built the Event Data infrastructure with transparency in mind.</p>
<h3 id="the-transparency-problem">The transparency problem</h3>
<p>For the scholarly community, alternative metrics to citation count (‘altmetrics’) are becoming increasingly popular as they can offer rich and expedited insight into today’s diverse and dynamic research environment. Research artifacts undergo an extended life online as they’re linked, shared, saved and discussed in forums both within and beyond the traditional academic ecosystem. Data on these interactions are initially fragmented and buried within platforms like social media, blogs and news sites. Downstream, there are several value-add services that collate and present that data as a single, aggregated count. We see individual data points like ‘paper X was tweeted 22 times’, and ‘paper X is referenced 16 times on Wikipedia’ being combined, homogenised, weighted and expressed as a single figure, a calculated number serving as a proxy for value. But altmetrics alone don&rsquo;t tell the whole story, and how they are calculated is not without idiosyncrasy or politics. As we each have our own unique voice and perspective, we need to ensure we understand the lenses through which these metrics are made in order to consume them effectively.</p>
<p>The 2015 <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363" target="_blank">Metric Tide report</a> highlighted transparency as one of the five dimensions of responsible metrics. Having access to the context used to create a metric — the provenance of the original data as well as full transparency around its extraction, processing and aggregation — helps consumers to use the data meaningfully and allows for comparison across third-party vendors. But transparency is difficult to achieve when, as the report notes, the systems and infrastructure for collecting and curating altmetrics-style data are fragmented and have limited interoperability.</p>
<p>In the academic community, underlying centralised systems include ORCIDs to identify people and DOIs to identify items. But we’re missing a transparent, centralised infrastructure for describing and recording the relationships between objects and resources<sup>1</sup>. These relationships, or links, occur outside publisher platforms and can provide valuable information about the interconnectivity and dissemination of research. Dedicated infrastructure for collecting these relationships would provide a data source for those interested in altmetrics to build upon.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig1.1_EventDiagram.png" alt="Event diagram" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.1 Example of some relationships between articles and activity on the web</em></p>
<p>At Crossref, we call these relationships Events. An Event is the record of a claim made about the existence of a relationship between a registered content item (i.e. a DOI) and a specific activity on the web. Events include:</p>
<ul>
<li>a DataCite dataset DOI contains a link to a Crossref article DOI</li>
<li>an article was referenced in Wikipedia</li>
<li>an article was mentioned on Twitter</li>
<li>an article has a Hypothes.is annotation</li>
<li>a blog contains a link to an article</li>
</ul>
<p>In collaboration with <a href="https://www.datacite.org/" target="_blank">DataCite</a>, we are collecting Events for the DOIs registered with our organisations and are making that data available for others in the community to use. This is the Event Data infrastructure, with which we’re plugging the gap in open scholarly relationships infrastructure.
<a href="https://0-staging-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-transparent-record-of-life-after-publication/">https://0-staging-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/a-transparent-record-of-life-after-publication/</a></p>
<h3 id="the-event-data-infrastructure">The Event Data infrastructure</h3>
<p>Crossref and DataCite have for many years provided a centralised location for bibliographic metadata and links, and a facility to help our members register Persistent Identifiers (DOIs) for their content. With nearly 100 million DOIs registered with Crossref, we know where research lives. Which got us thinking — could we use these links to find out more about the journey research undertakes after publication? Could we express these interactions as links without any aggregation or counts so it could be maximally reused? And if so, could we then provide this data in an open, centralised, structured format? The answer was yes, subject to some challenges:</p>
<ul>
<li>Querying for individual DOIs wasn’t scalable for our full corpus of 100 million items, so we had to find something else.</li>
<li>Not everyone uses the DOI link (not a surprise!). Most people will link directly to the publisher’s site. This means we need to look for links using both the DOI and article landing page URLs.</li>
<li>When we find people referring to registered content using its landing page, we find the DOI for that content item so that the link can be referenced in our data set in a stable, link-rot-proof way.</li>
<li>We don’t always know the article landing page URL for every DOI upfront because like many relationships, the one <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/urls-and-dois-a-complicated-relationship/">between DOIs and URLs</a> is complicated.</li>
</ul>
<p>We began by asking the wrong questions and as a result we got the wrong type of data back: instead of returning a record of individual actions, we were returning aggregated counts. Aside from not meeting our use case, aggregation requires the curation of an ever-churning dataset in order to keep totals updated, which is not scalable for the number of DOIs in our corpus.</p>
<p>We soon learnt to ask the right questions. One pivotal change in approach was that instead of counts, we asked instead ‘what activity is happening on Twitter for this article?’. Our data went from ‘DOI X was mentioned 20 times on Twitter as of this date’ to ‘tweet X mentions DOI X on this date’. The data are now represented as a subject-verb-object triple:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig1.2_TripleTable.png" alt="image table of data presented as triples" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.2 Triple table.</em></p>
<p>Ultimately this has allowed us to represent actions like Wikipedia page edits as individual atomic actions (i.e an Event) rather than as a dataset that changes over time.
Being open about the provenance of altmetrics with Event Data
Crossref Event Data (the Crossref-specific service powered by the shared Event Data infrastructure) has evolved beyond a link store to become a continual stream of Events; each Event tells a new part of the story. Rather than constantly updating an Event whenever a new action takes place, we add a new one instead:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig1.3_WikipediaEvent.png" alt="Wikipedia Event example" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.3 A Wikipedia Event.</em></p>
<p>Events answer a whole range of questions, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>What links to what?</li>
<li>How was the link made?</li>
<li>Which Agent collected the Event?</li>
<li>Which data source?</li>
<li>When was the link observed?</li>
<li>When do we think the link actually happened?</li>
<li>What algorithms were used to collect it?</li>
<li>Where’s the evidence?</li>
</ul>
<p>We’re collecting data from a diverse range of platforms including Twitter, Wikipedia, blogs and news sites, Reddit, StackExchange, Wordpress.com and Hypothes.is. This means that when we observe a link in these platforms to what we think is a DOI, we create an <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/data/events/" target="_blank">Event</a> and a corresponding <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/data/evidence-records/" target="_blank">Evidence Record</a> to represent our observation. We also have Events to represent the links between research items registered with Crossref and DataCite - for example, when a Crossref DOI deposit cites a DataCite DOI and vice versa.</p>
<p>The provenance of the data is fully transparent and is made available to everyone via an open API. We call this the evidence trail. The record of each link (‘Events’) as well as the corresponding evidence can then be used to feed into tools for impact measurement, discoverability, collaboration and network analysis.</p>
<p>Therefore, one application of Event Data is as an underlying, transparent data source for altmetrics calculations. For example, you might want to know the total number of times your paper has been mentioned on Twitter to date. If I told you that the number was 22, what does that actually mean? Do you know whether I counted both tweets and retweets? Do you consider both of these actions as equal? Is the sentiment of the tweet important to you? Was it a human or a bot that initiated a tweet? Are you interested in tweets containing links to multiple representations of your paper or do you only want to track mentions of your version of record (the final published copy)? With Event Data as your underlying data source, you can answer these questions.</p>
<h3 id="not-only-transparent-in-data-transparent-by-design">Not only transparent in data, transparent by design</h3>
<p>The <a href="http://www.niso.org/" target="_blank">National Information Standards Organisation</a> (NISO), a US organisation responsible for technical standards for publishing, bibliographic and library applications, has developed a set of recommendations for transparency in their <a href="https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/17091/NISO%20RP-25-2016%20Outputs%20of%20the%20NISO%20Alternative%20Assessment%20Project.pdf" target="_blank">Alternative Assessment Metrics Project report</a>, as well as a Code of Conduct for both altmetric practitioners and aggregators that aims to help improve the quality of altmetrics data. The working groups recognised that without transparency and conforming to a recognised standard, altmetric indicators &ldquo;are difficult to assess, and thus may be seen as less reliable for purposes of measuring influence or evaluation&rdquo;<sup>1</sup>.</p>
<p>Crossref Event Data is one of the example altmetric data providers listed in the NISO recommendations. My colleague Joe Wass participated in the development and specification of the NISO <a href="http://www.niso.org/press-releases/2016/05/niso-releases-draft-altmetrics-recommended-practices-data-metrics" target="_blank">&ldquo;Altmetrics Recommended Practices on Data Metrics, Alternative Outputs, and Persistent Identifiers&rdquo;</a> at the same time as we were working with DataCite on Event Data, so they have mutually informed one another.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Fig1.4_photo_MartinFenner_JoeWass.JPG" alt="image Martin Fenner and Joe Wass drawing plans on a whiteboard" width="600px" height="250" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.4 Martin Fenner (DataCite) and Joe Wass (Crossref) drawing plans for the Event Data infrastructure.</em></p>
<p>The outcome of our involvement in the NISO recommendations is that Crossref Event Data is a service that is transparent by design. We have opened up our entire extraction and processing workflow so that we can clearly demonstrate the context and environment that was used to generate an Event. This evidence is a core component of our transparency-first principle.</p>
<h3 id="building-services-on-event-data">Building services on Event Data</h3>
<p>There are some really exciting ways that people are already using Event Data, and we’re still only in beta. Our aim has always been to create an open, portable, transparent data set that can be used by our diverse community including researchers, application developers, publishers, funders and third-party service providers. We have already seen data from our service used in recent research studies, impact reports and even a front-end tool. Launched recently as a prototype, ImpactStory’s <a href="http://paperbuzz.org/" target="_blank">Paperbuzz.org</a> uses Event Data as one of its data sources for tracking the online buzz around scholarly articles. Jason Priem, cofounder of <a href="https://impactstory.org/" target="_blank">ImpactStory</a>, notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Because Crossref Event Data is completely open data, we believe it&rsquo;s a game-changer for altmetrics. Our latest project, Paperbuzz.org, is just the first of a whole constellation of upcoming tools that will add value on top of Crossref&rsquo;s open data.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We are working towards launching Crossref Event Data as a production service. In the meantime though, please do take a look at our comprehensive <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/" target="_blank">User Guide</a>. Hopefully you’ll be inspired to go make something cool using the data! Events are being collected constantly; take a look below as they stream in from our data sources or visit our <a href="http://0-live.eventdata.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/live.html" target="_blank">live stream demo</a> site to watch in real time.</p>
<div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;">
<iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CI93UgbFPuk" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" allowfullscreen title="YouTube Video"></iframe>
</div>
<p><em>Figure 1.5 Screen capture of Crossref Event Data live stream demo.</em></p>
<p>As the service matures, we’ll continue to add new platforms to track and I also encourage anyone with article link data to get in touch to discuss how we can share it with the community via Event Data.</p>
<p>For researchers in particular, I’m really keen to hear your thoughts on our data model and about the things we could additionally provide you with from an infrastructure perspective that would best support your research needs.</p>
<p>And if you’re a publisher, take a look at our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/publishers-help-us-capture-events-for-your-content/">Event Data best practice guidelines</a> — there’s some really important information in there about how you can help give us the best chance possible of collecting Events for your registered content.</p>
<p>And finally, if you’re a consumer of altmetrics data, I encourage you to ask questions. Ask your altmetrics vendors about how they gather their data and what context they apply to the aggregation of the metrics they supply. Ask yourself what behaviours you are interested in tracking and equally those you are not. Think about the endgame; about the type of impact you’re truly trying to measure and the story you want to tell. Because it’s these questions that will help you choose indicators that are the best fit for your own unique narrative.</p>
<hr />
<p>This content is cross-posted on <a href=" https://elifesciences.org/labs/995b64e4/a-transparent-record-of-life-after-publication" target="_blank">eLife Labs</a>.</p>
<p><em>References</em></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> Bilder, Geoffrey; Lin, Jennifer; Neylon, Cameron (2015): What exactly is infrastructure? Seeing the leopard&rsquo;s spots.
Retrieved: Oct 16, 2017; <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.1520432.v1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.1520432.v1</a></p>
<p><sup>2</sup> NISO, <em>Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Project</em>. Retrieved: 6th October 2017; <a href="http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/17091/NISO%20RP-25-2016%20Outputs%20of%20the%20NISO%20Alternative%20Assessment%20Project.pdf">http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/17091/NISO%20RP-25-2016%20Outputs%20of%20the%20NISO%20Alternative%20Assessment%20Project.pdf</a>, p.2.</p>
Meet the members, Part 1 (with Oxfam)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/meet-the-members-part-1-with-oxfam/
Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/meet-the-members-part-1-with-oxfam/<p>Introducing our new blog series <em>Meet the members;</em> where we talk to some of our members and find out a little bit more about them, ask them to share how they use our services, and discuss what their plans for the future are. To start the series we talk to Liam Finnis of Oxfam.</p>
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<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/oxfam.jpg" alt=“Oxfam logo" height="250px" width="250px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<h2 id="can-you-tell-us-a-little-bit-about-oxfam">Can you tell us a little bit about Oxfam?</h2>
<p>Around the globe, Oxfam works to find practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thrive. We save lives and help rebuild livelihoods when crisis strikes. And we campaign so that the voices of the poor influence the local and global decisions that affect them.</p>
<p>Oxfam’s Policy &amp; Practice platform is the gateway to Oxfam’s knowledge, experience, and thinking. Policy &amp; Practice aims to influence, enable and learn from others by sharing and collaborating online with professionals and practitioners.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-your-role-within-oxfam">What’s your role within Oxfam?</h2>
<p>My name is Liam Finnis and I am the Website Manager for Oxfam GB’s <a href="http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/">Policy &amp; Practice</a> site and the <a href="http://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/oxfam/">Oxfam Digital Repository</a>. In addition to maintenance and development of our platforms, my role focuses on raising the visibility of our programme work including approach and methodology, while also ensuring the availability and accessibility of our publications and resources.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-your-participation-level">What’s your participation level?</h2>
<p>We joined Crossref in 2016, but only really began fully implementing DOIs this year. We have registered 139 content items as of October, with the majority assigned in 2017. While this only constitutes a small number of our total publications (roughly 6%), we’ve focused on current and future publications rather than retroactive application (with a handful of exceptions).</p>
<h2 id="tell-us-a-bit-about-what-you-publish-and-for-whom">Tell us a bit about what you publish and for whom</h2>
<p>We produce roughly 220 publications each year, with a library of 4,450 spanning 40 years. Roughly half of this would be considered grey literature and includes: research reports; evaluations; briefing papers; technical briefings; case studies; guidelines and toolkits. We also publish the <em>Gender &amp; Development</em> <em>Journal</em> with Routledge/Taylor &amp; Francis.</p>
<p>While our organisational focus is on inequalities and the eradication of poverty, this isn’t something we can achieve by looking solely at economic models. Our publications span a range of subject areas including: climate change; food and livelihoods; economics; gender; conflicts and disasters; land rights; and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH).</p>
<p>Our audience ranges from humanitarian and development practitioners to policy makers to researchers and academics. We publish the research that underpins our campaigns advocacy work; the evaluations of our emergency response efforts; reports outlining the methodologies we’ve applied; briefings on policy and recommendations; and, toolkits and guidelines for research, programme quality and responsible data management.</p>
<h2 id="what-do-you-think-makes-your-publications-unique">What do you think makes your publications unique?</h2>
<p>Oxfam is one of the only NGOs that is actively sharing an extensive body of knowledge and experience. With 75 years of experience working on a global scale, our publications help to share learning and encourage best practice. Further to that, they showcase the changes (gradual or sudden) that we’ve seen in how development and humanitarian aid is defined and approached through the decades.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/oxfam/handle/10546/141359">The Oxfam Gender Training Manual</a></em>, published in 1991, remains one of our most frequently accessed resources; still widely regarded as a relevant, unique and valuable resource within the sector. Another of our key publications, <em><a href="https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/oxfam/handle/10546/338125">Wealth: Having it all and wanting more</a></em>, was published in 2015, outlining the methodology and data sources for Oxfam’s frequently cited fact ‘85 billionaires have the same wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population’.</p>
<p>The diversity in subject and format of our publications isn’t necessarily unique, but I’m reasonably confident that there is something in our publications that will relate to everyone.</p>
<h2 id="what-trends-are-you-seeing-in-your-part-of-the-scholarly-publishing-community">What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly publishing community?</h2>
<p>This is difficult to quantify as, while we have been lightly engaged with the scholarly publishing community in the past, we’ve been significantly more active in the past year. In addition to more actively applying DOIs, early in 2017 we were included in EBSCO Discovery and in March we made efforts to improve the visibility of our Digital Repository. Previously, the key route was through the Policy &amp; Practice website, which brought together publications with blogs and pages focused on programmes, projects, approaches and methodology.</p>
<p>Since making these two changes we’ve seen a significant increase in access of our resources directly from the repository. This has come in addition to the general usage through Policy &amp; Practice. We are also working with Research4Life, INASP and TEEAL to improve visibility and accessibility of our publications more widely.</p>
<h2 id="how-would-you-describe-the-value-of-being-a-crossref-member">How would you describe the value of being a Crossref member?</h2>
<p>In the past two years, we’ve been looking into how we can ensure that our publications are visible and accessible to a wider audience. Becoming a member of Crossref and registering content with Crossref is a big part of that. It helps to give us a place in the discussions and events as well as enabling us to better understand and meeting scholarly publishing standards and implement best practice.</p>
<h2 id="what-are-oxfam-s-plans-for-the-future">What are Oxfam&rsquo;s plans for the future?</h2>
<p>In terms of our work with Crossref and an active role in the scholarly publishing community, we’re still fairly new to it and we’re starting to see some of the benefits of our efforts. In the future, we’re looking to get a better idea of the opportunities available and build on our recent work.</p>
<p>Personally, I’m really interested in exploring Crossref Event Data in greater detail and seeing how it can help us map the impact of our work more effectively.</p>
<p><br>
Thanks, Liam!</p>Peer reviews are open for registering at Crossrefhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/peer-reviews-are-open-for-registering-at-crossref/
Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/peer-reviews-are-open-for-registering-at-crossref/<p><a href="https://0-authorservices-taylorandfrancis-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/peer-review-global-view/">About 13-20 billion researcher-hours</a> were spent in 2015 doing peer reviews. What valuable work! Let&rsquo;s get more mileage out of these labors and make these expert discussions citable, persistent, and linked up to the scholarly record. As we <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/making-peer-reviews-citable-discoverable-and-creditable/">previously shared</a> during Peer Review week, Crossref is launching a new content type to support the registration of peer reviews. We’re one step closer to changing that. Today, we are excited to announce that we’re open for deposits.</p>
<div style="float:left;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/televisionset.png" alt="tv set" width="60px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>If you missed the first episode, here’s a recap:</p>
<p>Publishers have been registering reviews with us for a while (ex: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/j.engfracmech.2015.01.019">Example 1</a>, <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5194/wes-1-177-2016">Example 2</a>, and <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14322/PUBLONS.R518142">Example 3</a>). But these have been shoehorned into other content: article, dataset, or component. So we are extending Crossref’s infrastructure to properly treat this special scholarly artifact. This includes a range of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history (referee reports, decision letters, author responses, community comments) across any and all review rounds. We welcome scholarly discussions of journal articles before or after publication (e.g. “post-publication reviews”).</p>
<p>We collect metadata that characterizes the peer review asset (for example: recommendation, type, license, contributor info, competing interests). We also collect metadata, which offers a view into the review process (e.g. pre/post-publication, revision round, review date).</p>
<p>This special set will support the discovery and investigation of peer reviews as it is linked up to the article discussed. It will also enable the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Enable tracking of the evolution of scholarly claims through the lineage of expert discussion</li>
<li>Support enrichment of scholarly discussion</li>
<li>Enable reviewer accountability</li>
<li>Credit reviewers and editors for their scholarly contribution</li>
<li>Support publisher transparency</li>
<li>Connect reviews to the full history of the published results</li>
<li>Provide data for analysis and research on peer review</li>
</ul>
<p>Please come check out our <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/115005255706">documentation on the new Crossref content type</a> for more information.</p>
<p>As publishers are implementing this, we are finishing up the delivery of this metadata for machine and human access, across all the Crossref interfaces (<a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">REST API</a>, <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213679866-OAI-PMH-subscriber-only-">OAI-PMH</a>, <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">Crossref Metadata Search</a>) to enable discoverability across the research ecosystem. We are also working to make it possible for members to get Cited-by data for the peer reviews they register.</p>
<p>If you are interested in registering your peer review content with us, please <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">get in touch</a>.</p>What happened at last month's LIVE local in Londonhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-happened-at-last-months-live-local-in-london/
Sun, 22 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/what-happened-at-last-months-live-local-in-london/<p>So much has happened since we held LIVE16 (our annual meeting) in London last year that we wanted to check-in with our UK community and share the year’s developments around our tools, teams and services ahead of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">LIVE17</a> next month in Singapore.</p>
<p>And so, on 26th September we held a half-day &lsquo;<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals">LIVE local</a>&rsquo;, covering a wide range of strategic topics, well-attended by a diverse representation of our UK community of publishers, funders, researchers, and tool-makers.</p>
<p>What we discussed on the day:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ed Pentz, Crossref&rsquo;s Executive Director, kicked the day off with <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/whats-new-at-crossref-ed-pentz-london-live-2017">&lsquo;What’s new at Crossref&rsquo;</a></li>
<li>Geoffrey Bilder, Strategic Director, talked us through <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/new-initiatives-geoffrey-bilder-london-live-2017">&lsquo;Crossref&rsquo;s Strategic Initiatives&rsquo;</a></li>
<li>Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member and Community Outreach introduced <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/metadata-2020-ginny-hendricks-london-live-2017">&lsquo;Metadata 2020&rsquo;</a></li>
<li>Rachael Lammey, Head of International Outreach discussed the <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/global-reach-of-crossref-metadata-rachael-lammey-london-live-2017">&lsquo;Global reach of Crossref metadata&rsquo;</a></li>
<li>Jure Triglav from Coko Foundation presented some interesting <a href="http://slides.com/jure/metadata-collaboration">&lsquo;Metadata Use Case Studies&rsquo;</a></li>
<li>Jennifer Lin, Director of Product Management, spoke about Crossref&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/new-product-developments-jennifer-lin-london-live-2017">&lsquo;New Product Developments&rsquo;</a></li>
<li>Ed Pentz concluded the day leading a discussion on <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CrossRef/crossref-future-direction-ed-pentz-london-live-2017">&lsquo;Crossref&rsquo;s Future Direction&rsquo;</a></li>
</ul>
<iframe src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/pdfs/crossref-london-live.pdf" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"></iframe>
<p>This event was one in a series of smaller, regional events which aim to better cater to our global membership and provide a tailored program of activities. You can read more about this series of events on our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals">LIVE locals</a> page, and if you are interested in hosting an event near you or have suggestions for one in your region then please <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">contact me</a> to get involved.</p>Celebrating ORCID at fivehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/celebrating-orcid-at-five/
Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/celebrating-orcid-at-five/<p>Happy birthday, ORCID! It&rsquo;s their fifth birthday today and it&rsquo;s gratifying to me&mdash;as a founding board member and former Chair of the board&mdash;to see how successful it has become. ORCID has a great staff, over 700 members from 41 countries and is quickly approaching 4 million ORCID iDs. Crossref&mdash;it&rsquo;s board, staff, and members&mdash;has been an ORCID supporter from the start. One example of this support is that we seconded Geoffrey Bilder to be ORCID&rsquo;s interim CTO for about eight months.</p>
<p>Actually, Crossref has been involved with ORCID even before the start.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/orcid-at-5.jpg" alt="ORCID turns five" width="300px" class="img-responsive" />
</div>
<p>ORCID&rsquo;s birthday recognizes when the registry went live in 2012 but the origins of what became ORCID stretch back to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-author-id-meeting">a meeting that Crossref organized back in February 2007 on &ldquo;Author IDs&rdquo;</a>. After this meeting there were many follow on discussions but it was clear that as an association of scholarly publishers Crossref didn&rsquo;t have suitable governance for an researcher identifier registry which needed support from a broader group of stakeholders.</p>
<p>Subsequent discussions between Nature and Thomson Reuters (represented by Howard Ratner Dave Kochalko) led&mdash;after many more meetings&mdash;to ORCID being set up as a new organization. ORCID was incorporated in September 2010 and the first meeting of the board of directors of ORCID was on October 8th, 2010.</p>
<p>A lot of people and organizations have contributed to getting ORCID to where it is today and it&rsquo;s been great to be a part of it and continue to contribute to their future.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reflecting on the creation of ORCID: it has shown the power of collaboration in improving scholarly research, and in making life easier and better for researchers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today they <a href="https://orcid.org/blog/2017/10/13/orcid5-coming">celebrate in a number of fun ways</a> and, in particular, mark the occasion with the release of <a href="https://orcid.org/blog/2017/10/16/celebrating-orcid5-launch-new-resources">a new set of educational resources</a>.</p>
<p>From everyone in the Crossref community, here&rsquo;s to ORCID&rsquo;s continuing success!</p>Changes to the 2018 membership agreement for better metadata distributionhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/changes-to-the-2018-membership-agreement-for-better-metadata-distribution/
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/changes-to-the-2018-membership-agreement-for-better-metadata-distribution/<p>We are making a change to section 9b of the standard Crossref membership agreement which will come into effect on January 1, 2018. This will not change how members register content, nor will it affect membership fees in any way. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/2018-agreement/">The new 2018 agreement is on our website</a>, and the exact wording changes are highlighted below. The new membership agreement will automatically replace the previous version from January 1, 2018 and members will not need to sign a new agreement.</p>
<h2 id="what-s-changing">What’s changing?</h2>
<p>At its July meeting the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/">Crossref board</a> unanimously approved recommendations from the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/committees/membership-and-fees/">Membership and Fees Committee</a> to update Crossref’s metadata delivery offerings. One of the recommendations was to remove the option for case-by-case opt outs of metadata delivery through the OAI-PMH channel used for Enhanced Crossref Metadata Services.</p>
<p>This opt-out was only used by a small number of our members (around 40 of nearly 9,000), who have been contacted directly. This means that for the vast majority of members there is no change in how Crossref makes their metadata available but we wanted to make everyone aware of the change to the membership agreement.</p>
<p>So, as is currently the case, all metadata registered with Crossref is available via all the Metadata APIs under an appropriate agreement with the user or terms and conditions for the service. The one exception to this is how references are distributed - we will contact members next week about the options for references.</p>
<h2 id="why-are-we-making-this-change">Why are we making this change?</h2>
<ol>
<li>Our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/metadata-delivery/">metadata services</a> have become very popular with users of all kinds throughout scholarly communications&ndash;including search and discovery platforms, libraries, other publishers, reference managers, sharing services, and analytics providers. More and better metadata means more and better discoverability of publisher content.</li>
<li>The change also brings this service into line with our mission to improve scholarly communications through quality metadata and related infrastructure services, removing the need for bilateral agreements between publishers and third parties.</li>
<li>Many members complained when we contacted them about opt-outs whenever a new OAI-PMH user came on board. It is better for our members and for our staff if there is a common standard across the board.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="changes-to-2018-membership-agreement">Changes to 2018 membership agreement</h2>
<p><strong>9) Sharing of Metadata by PILA</strong></p>
<p>a) <em>Local Hosting</em>. [no change]</p>
<p>b) <em>Other Metadata Services</em>. Subject to compliance <strong>by the entity receiving the Metadata and Digital Identifiers</strong> with the terms and conditions <del>set forth in a separate agreement between</del> <strong>established by</strong> PILA <strong>for the particular service through which access is provided,</strong> and <del>the entity receiving the Metadata and Digital Identifiers</del>, PILA may <del>license</del> <strong>authorize</strong> third parties to receive and use <del>bulk deliveries of</del> Metadata and Digital Identifiers from <del>the</del> PILA <del>System from members who have chosen to participate in Metadata Services,</del> which PILA shall provide directly to such third parties. <del>At least thirty (30) days prior to making such Metadata delivery PILA will notify each PILA Member whose Metadata and Digital Identifiers are intended to be included in such delivery of the anticipated delivery date, the identity of the third party and the purpose for which the delivery is being made. Metadata and Digital Identifiers belonging to any PILA Member who notifies PILA in writing prior to the specified delivery date of its desire to be excluded from such delivery will be excluded or removed from such delivery.</del></p>
<hr />
<p>Please <a href="mailto:member@crossref.org">contact our membership team</a> if you have any feedback or questions.</p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 6 (with NLS)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-6-with-nls/
Fri, 06 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-6-with-nls/<p>Continuing our <a href="https://crossref.org/categories/api-case-study/">blog series</a> highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Ulf Kronman, Bibliometric Analyst at the <a href="http://www.kb.se/english/">National Library of Sweden</a> about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.</p>
<h3 id="introducing-the-national-library-of-sweden-nls">Introducing the National Library of Sweden (NLS)</h3>
<p>The NLS is a state agency, has a staff of about 320, and its main offices in Stockholm. Its primary duty is to preserve the Swedish cultural heritage by collecting everything printed in Sweden, and has been doing so since 1661. Nowadays the library also collects Swedish TV and radio programs, movies, videos, music, and computer games.</p>
<p>The National Library coordinates services and programs for all publicly funded libraries in Sweden and runs the national library catalogue system Libris and the national database for Swedish scholarly output, SwePub. The library also runs the Bibsam consortium, negotiating national subscription licenses and open access publishing agreements with publishers.</p>
<p><em>Images left to right: External and internal view of the National Library of Sweden, and Ulf Kronman, Bibliometric Analyst at NLS.</em></p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/nls-blog-image.png" alt="diptic image view NLS and Ulf Kronman Bibliometric Analyst" class="img-responsive" /></p>
<h3 id="what-problem-is-your-service-trying-to-solve">What problem is your service trying to solve?</h3>
<p>The metadata in the national scholarly publication database <a href="http://info.swepub.kb.se/bibliometri">SwePub</a> is harvested from the Swedish universities&rsquo; local publication systems, where data often is entered manually by librarians and researchers. This means that the metadata can contain a lot of omissions, synonyms, spelling variants and errors. Using Crossref, we can enhance and correct the metadata delivered to us, if we just have a correct DOI.</p>
<h3 id="can-you-tell-us-how-you-are-using-crossref-metadata-at-the-national-library-of-sweden">Can you tell us how you are using Crossref metadata at the National Library of Sweden?</h3>
<p>The Crossref metadata is presently used in two projects; <em>Open APC Sweden</em> and in our <em>local analysis database</em> for publication statistics used in negotiations with publishers.</p>
<p>Open APC Sweden is a pilot project to gather data on open access publication costs (APC&rsquo;s – Article Processing Charges) from Swedish universities. The project is modelled from the German Bielefeld University Open APC initiative, which is a part of the <a href="https://www.intact-project.org/openapc/">INTACT</a> project. After APC data has been delivered to the APC system, scripts are run against the Crossref API to fetch information about publishers and journals. <a href="https://github.com/Kungbib/openapc-se/blob/master/README.md">A description of Open APC Sweden can be found here.</a></p>
<p>When building our local analysis database for publisher statistics, we download data from the SwePub database, use the Crossref DOIs for API lookup against Crossref to add correct ISSN and publisher data to the records and then match the records against a list of publisher serials. In this way, we can get information about how much Swedish researchers have been publishing with a certain publisher and use this data when negotiating conditions for open access publishing with the publisher in question.</p>
<h3 id="what-metadata-values-do-you-pull-from-the-api">What metadata values do you pull from the API?</h3>
<p>In Open APC Sweden, a Python script supplied by staff at the Bielefeld University is used to pull metadata about publisher and journal names and ISSN&rsquo;s from the Crossref API. The result is entered into an enriched version of the APC data files delivered by the universities and then statistics can be calculated on the result using an R script. <a href="https://github.com/Kungbib/openapc-se/blob/master/statistics.md">The result can be seen here.</a></p>
<p>In the local analysis database, a modified copy of the Bielefeld Python script is used to add the same metadata to the records before matching them against publisher serial ISSNs.</p>
<h3 id="have-you-built-your-own-interface-to-extract-this-data">Have you built your own interface to extract this data?</h3>
<p>In Open APC Sweden, the Python script is developed and maintained at the Bielefeld University and an exact copy is being run in the Swedish project.</p>
<p>In the local analysis system, the Python script is somewhat modified to suit the special demands of this system.</p>
<p>But sometimes it is very convenient just to use the main <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/&lt;DOI">DOI lookup link</a> to do a manual check-up of problematic records.</p>
<h3 id="how-often-do-you-extract-query-data">How often do you extract/query data?</h3>
<p>In Open APC Sweden, usually about two-three times a month, when new datasets are delivered from the universities. In the local analysis database, usually lookups are being done on a daily basis as development of the database continues.</p>
<h3 id="what-do-you-do-with-the-metadata-once-it-s-pulled-from-the-api">What do you do with the metadata once it’s pulled from the API?</h3>
<p>In Open APC Sweden, the metadata is going into the APC data files for processing of statistics. In the local analysis database, the metadata is used to match against publisher journal ISSN&rsquo;s.</p>
<h3 id="what-plans-do-you-have-for-the-future">What plans do you have for the future?</h3>
<p>For the Open APC Sweden I would like to build a database system to make the system more scalable than just working with flat data files.</p>
<p>With both the SwePub system and the local analysis system, we are now using the new service oaDOI and their API to look up metadata about the open access status of the publications to enrich our local systems.</p>
<h3 id="what-else-would-you-like-to-see-the-rest-api-offer">What else would you like to see the REST API offer?</h3>
<p>In the process of normalising the publishers&rsquo; names, the names returned are sometimes at a &ldquo;too high&rdquo; or on a too generic level to be used to generate good statistics. For instance, Springer Nature are sometimes returned as <em>Springer Nature</em>, sometimes as <em>Springer Science + Business Media</em> and sometimes as <em>Nature Publishing Group</em>. A similar thing is valid for <em>Taylor &amp; Francis</em>, where the mother company <em>Informa UK Limited</em> is returned instead of the publishing subsidiary of the company. One thing to wish for here is that we could agree on some kind of normalisation of the publishers&rsquo; names and that Crossref could return this as a supplement to the present metadata.</p>
<hr />
<p>Thanks Ulf! If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact me, <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack Wood</a>.</p>Publishers, help us capture Events for your contenthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/publishers-help-us-capture-events-for-your-content/
Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000Madeleine Watsonhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/publishers-help-us-capture-events-for-your-content/<p>The day I received my learner driver permit, I remember being handed three things: a plastic thermosealed reminder that age sixteen was not a good look on me; a yellow L-plate sign as flimsy as my driving ability; and a weighty ‘how to drive’ guide listing all the things that I absolutely must not, under any circumstances, even-if-it-seems-like-a-really-swell-idea-at-the-time, never, ever do.</p>
<p>The margin space dedicated to finger-wagging left little room for championing any driving-do’s. And as each page delivered a fresh new warning, my enthusiasm for hitting the road sunk to levels usually reserved for activities like trigonometry and visits to my orthodontist.</p>
<p>Many years (and an excellent driving record) later, I’m reminded of this again now when thinking about our own Event Data User Guide. Because it contains a chapter with some really important don&rsquo;ts for our members. Really good, we’d-love-you-to-consider-not-doing-these-things type of advice. But despite our intent to encourage, I feel the ghost of finger-waggers past. So in the spirit of championing enthusiasm over ennui, I thought I’d attempt to contextualise our <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/best-practice/publishers-best-practice/">Event Data Best Practices Guide for Publishers</a> and show you why there’s a lot of good reasons for publishers to be enthusiastic about these rules.</p>
<p>So if you’re a publisher, I encourage you to read on to learn more about how you can help us have the best chance possible of capturing Events for your content.</p>
<div class="blue-highlight">
<span>What&rsquo;s in it for you? Well, collecting this data helps to give everyone (Crossref, yourself, and others) a better picture of how your content is being used, including for altmetrics.</span>
</div>
<h3 id="1-please-let-us-in">1. Please let us in</h3>
<p>Please do open the door when we come knocking, we promise not to stay long. You can do this by allowing the User Agent <code>CrossrefEventDataBot</code> to visit your site, and whitelisting it if necessary. The bot is how we visit URLs to confirm if they are for an item of content registered with us. The reason why we’re visiting your site could include:</p>
<ul>
<li>someone tweeted an article landing page</li>
<li>someone discussed it on Reddit</li>
<li>it was linked to from a blog post</li>
</ul>
<p>The Bot has only one job: to work out the DOI. No information beyond this is stored. Whenever we become aware of a link that we think points to a DOI or an Article Landing Page, we follow it so we can collect the required metadata. Everything in Crossref Event Data is linked via its DOI, so it&rsquo;s important that we can collect this information.</p>
<p>The bot will identify itself using the standard method. It sets two headers:</p>
<ul>
<li>Referer: <a href="https://0-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">https://0-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu</a></li>
<li>User-Agent: CrossrefEventDataBot (eventdata@crossref.org)</li>
</ul>
<p>Once we confirm that a link points to registered content, we then log an Event for the DOI. You should expect our bot to visit no more than once or twice per second, although if there is a period of activity around your articles, you may see higher rates. The bot also takes a sample of DOIs and visits them to work out which domain names belong to our members, so it can maintain a list. This can happen every few weeks. You may see a small number of requests from the bot, but limited to one per second.</p>
<p>If we can’t enter your site to look for metadata though, then we won’t be able to collect Events for your DOIs. So by allowing our bot, you will be helping us to collect Event Data for your registered content.</p>
<p>If you’re worried about traffic on your site, consider sending us your mapping of article landing pages to DOIs. Because <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/urls-and-dois-a-complicated-relationship/">Resource URLs aren&rsquo;t the same as article landing pages</a>, we need more information than the DOI Resource URLs that you already send us.</p>
<p>If you’re running a blog or website (and you’re not a member of Crossref), you may also see our bot visiting, to look for links that comprise Events. Please allow us to visit, so we can record in our Event Data service the fact that your website links to registered content.</p>
<h3 id="2-we-robots-txt">2. We ❤️ robots.txt</h3>
<p>Robots.txt files are important and we ensure our Event Data Bot respects yours. If we are instructed not to visit a site, we won&rsquo;t. So if you want us to visit your site in order to check the metadata of your article landing page, please ensure you provide an exception for our Bot, or make sure that you’re not blocking it. Check the restrictions in your file to see if we’re allowed to visit. This is just another way you can help us work for you.</p>
<h3 id="3-include-the-dc-identifier">3. Include the DC Identifier</h3>
<p>Including good metadata is general best practice for scholarly publishing. When we visit a publisher’s site, we look for metadata embedded in the HTML document (such as DC.Identifier tags that, amongst other things, enable Crossmark to work).</p>
<p>By ensuring you include a Dublin Core identifier meta tag in each of your articles pages, our system can match your landing pages back to DOIs.</p>
<p>Here’s an example:</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/ced-blog-code.png" alt="example of code" width="550px"
class="img-responsive" /></p>
<h3 id="4-let-us-in-even-if-we-don-t-bring-cookies">4. Let us in, even if we don’t bring cookies</h3>
<p>We’re like that friend who turns up for dinner without bringing a bottle of wine. And we hope that you’ll be ok with that. Some Publisher sites don&rsquo;t allow browsers to visit unless cookies are enabled and they block visitors that don&rsquo;t accept them. If your site does this, we will be unable to collect Events for your DOIs. Allowing your site to be accessed without cookies will help give us the best chance of successfully reading your metadata.</p>
<h3 id="5-we-may-not-speak-your-language">5. We may not speak your language</h3>
<p>Sometimes we come across a publisher’s site that won’t render unless JavaScript is enabled. This means that the site won’t show any content to browsers that don&rsquo;t execute JavaScript. The Event Data Bot does not execute JavaScript when looking for a DOI. This means that if your site requires JavaScript, then we will be unable to collect DOIs for your Events. Consider allowing your site to be accessed without JavaScript. And if this is not possible, then if you ensure you include the <meta name="dc.identifier"> tag in the HTML header, then we’ll do our best to collect Events for your registered content.</p>
<p>If you want to pass this on to your friendly system administrator, the best practice is documented in full here: <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/best-practice/publishers-best-practice/">https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/best-practice/publishers-best-practice/</a>. And sorry about all the don’ts you’ll find on that page…. don’t let them curb your enthusiasm for taking Event Data out for a spin!</p>BestBlogsReadhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/bestblogsread/
Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/bestblogsread/<p>We know that <strong>research communication happens everywhere</strong>, and we want your help in finding it!</p>
<p>From October 9th we will be collecting links sent in by you through a social campaign across Twitter and Facebook called <strong>#BestBlogsRead.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Simply send us links to the blogs YOU like to read</strong>
It’s easy to participate, all you have to do is watch out for the daily tweets and facebook posts and then send us links to the blogs (and news sites) you read.</p>
<p>From gardening to gaming, recipes to rock climbing, tennis to taxidermy - whatever blogs you read, we want to hear about them!</p>
<p><strong>Because research happens everywhere!</strong>
And you’ll be surprised where it <strong>is</strong> mentioned - for example:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>We found <a href="http://0-onlinelibrary.wiley.com.libus.csd.mu.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0498.1969.tb00136.x/abstract?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+unavailable+on+Saturday+7th+Oct+from+03.00+EDT+%2F+08%3A00+BST+%2F+12%3A30+IST+%2F+15.00+SGT+to+08.00+EDT+%2F+13.00+BST+%2F+17%3A30+IST+%2F+20.00+SGT+and+Sunday+8th+Oct+from+03.00+EDT+%2F+08%3A00+BST+%2F+12%3A30+IST+%2F+15.00+SGT+to+06.00+EDT+%2F+11.00+BST+%2F+15%3A30+IST+%2F+18.00+SGT+for+essential+maintenance.+Apologies+for+the+inconvenience+caused+.">a Wiley</a> article mentioned in a blog about <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thales-predicts-eclipse-mystery-ancient-greece?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&amp;utm_campaign=810eff404b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_09&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_f36db9c480-810eff404b-66765933&amp;ct=t(Newsletter_8_9_2017)&amp;mc_cid=810eff404b&amp;mc_eid=4e0067d656">the eclipse</a></p></li>
<li><p>An <a href="http://0-pubs.acs.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/doi/abs/10.1021/tx9002726">American Chemical Society</a> article in a blog about <a href="http://www.allergy-insight.com/free-from-at-bellavita/">food allergies </a></p></li>
<li><p>A blog about Neanderthals on the <a href="https://0-www-theatlantic-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/science/archive/2017/09/neanderthals-lost-history/540507/">Atlantic</a> links to and article from the <a href="http://0-doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1126/science.1174462">American Association for the Advancement of Science</a></p></li>
</ul>
<p>So, watch out for the campaign on Twitter and Facebook, and tell us about your #BestBlogsRead.</p>
Crossref at the Frankfurt Book Fairhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-at-the-frankfurt-book-fair/
Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-at-the-frankfurt-book-fair/<p>We’ll be at booth M82 in the Hotspot area of Hall 4.2 and would love to meet with you. Let us know if you’re interested in chatting with one of us - about anything at all.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:kmeddings@crossref.org">Kirsty Meddings</a>, <strong>Product Manager</strong>: Here to help with Crossref services such as Crossmark and funding data, and happy to talk about your metadata and how you can deposit more.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:pdavis@crossref.org">Paul Davis</a>, <strong>Support Specialist</strong>: Any issues with metadata deposit, or anything technical, I’m your man.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:scollins@crossref.org">Susan Collins</a>, <strong>Publisher Outreach Manager:</strong> If you’re a member and have questions about how things are going, or try out additional services, I can help.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:jkemp@crossref.org">Jennifer Kemp</a>, <strong>Affiliate Outreach Manager</strong>: Come to me if you want to get Metadata from Crossref, or discuss our imminent new service for social mentions and data links: <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-enters-beta">Event Data (in Beta)</a>.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:ghendricks@crossref.org">Ginny Hendricks</a>, <strong>Member &amp; Community Outreach Director</strong>: I’d love to talk to publishers and platforms about the new <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org">Metadata 2020</a> initiative.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:abartell@crossref.org">Amanda Bartell</a>, <strong>Head of Member Experience</strong>: This will be my first day at Crossref! If there is something you’d like the Membership team to do or change, please let me know.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:ccormackwood@crossref.org">Chrissie Cormack-Wood</a>, <strong>Head of Marketing Communications</strong>: I’ll be acting as &ldquo;host&rdquo; so ask me anything about our booth and activities at the Fair. Ideas for joint campaigns or co-promotion are welcome too.</p>
<p>If some of these topics are on your agenda, or if you’re not sure who to contact, <a href="mailto:ccormackwood@crossref.org">please let me know</a> and I’ll set up a 30-minute meeting at our booth, M82 in Hall 4.2.</p>
<div class="blue-highlight">
<span>And, if you don’t get a chance to visit us at our stand, make sure you don’t miss Ginny’s <a href="http://www.metadata2020.org">Metadata 2020</a> talk at 2.30pm on Wednesday 11th, at the Hot Spot stage in the corner of Hall 4.2, area N99.</span>
</div>
<p>We hope you have a great Book Fair!</p>Event Data as Underlying Altmetrics Infrastructure at the 4:AM Altmetrics Conferencehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-as-underlying-altmetrics-infrastructure-at-the-4am-altmetrics-conference/
Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Joe Wasshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-as-underlying-altmetrics-infrastructure-at-the-4am-altmetrics-conference/
<p>I&rsquo;m here in Toronto and looking forward to a busy week. Maddy Watson and I are in town for the <a href="http://altmetricsconference.com/">4:AM Altmetrics Conference</a>, as well as the <a href="http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics17/">altmetrics17 workshop</a> and Hack-day. I&rsquo;ll be speaking at each, and for those of you who aren&rsquo;t able to make it, I&rsquo;ve combined both presentations into a handy blog post, which follows on from <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/you-do-want-to-see-how-its-made-seeing-what-goes-into-altmetrics/">my last one</a>.</p>
<p>But first, nothing beats a good demo. <a href="https://0-live-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/live.html">Take a look at our live stream</a>. This shows the Events passing through Crossref Event Data, live, as they happen. You may need to wait a few seconds before you see anything.</p>
<h2 id="crossref-and-scholarly-links">Crossref and scholarly links</h2>
<p>You may know about Crossref. If you don&rsquo;t, we are a non-profit organisation that works with Publishers (getting on for nine thousand) to register scholarly publications, issue Persistent Identifiers (DOIs) and maintain the infrastructure required to keep them working. If you don&rsquo;t know what a DOI is, it&rsquo;s a link that looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345678">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5555/12345678</a></p>
<p>When you click on that, you&rsquo;ll be taken to the landing page for that article. If the landing page moves, the DOI can be updated so you&rsquo;re taken to the right place. This is why Crossref was created in the first place: to register Persistent Identifiers to combat link rot and to allow Publishers to work together and cite each other&rsquo;s content. A DOI is a single, canonical identifier that can be used to refer to scholarly content.</p>
<p>Not only that, we combine that with metadata and links. Links to authors via ORCIDs, references and citations via DOIs, funding bodies and grant numbers, clinical trials&hellip; the list goes on. All of this data is provided by our members and most of it is made available via our free API.</p>
<p>Because we are the central place that publishers register their content, and we&rsquo;ve got approaching 100 million items of Registered Content, we thought that we could also curate and collect altmetrics type data for our corpus of publications. After all, a reference from a Tweet to an article is a link, just like a citation between two articles is a link.</p>
<h2 id="an-experiment">An Experiment</h2>
<p>So, a few years back we thought we would try and track altmetrics for DOIs. This was done as a Crossref Labs experiment. We grabbed a copy of PLOS ALM (since renamed Lagotto), loaded a sample of DOIs into it and watched as it struggled to keep up.</p>
<p>It was a good experiment, as it showed that we weren&rsquo;t asking exactly the right questions. There were a few things that didn&rsquo;t quite fit. Firstly, it required every DOI to be loaded into it up-front, and, in some cases, for the article landing page for every DOI to be known. This doesn&rsquo;t scale to tens of millions. Secondly, it had to scan over every DOI on a regular schedule and make an API query for each one. That doesn&rsquo;t scale either. Thirdly, the kind of data it was requesting was usually in the form of a count. It asked the question:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;How many tweets are there for this article as of today?&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This fulfilled the original use case for PLOS ALM at PLOS. But when running it at Crossref, on behalf of every publisher out there, the results raised more questions than they answered. Which was good, because it was a Labs Experiment.</p>
<h2 id="asking-the-right-question">Asking the right question</h2>
<p>The whole journey to Crossref Event Data has been a process of working out how to ask the right question. There are a number of ways in which &ldquo;How many tweets are there for this article as of today?&rdquo; isn&rsquo;t the right question. It doesn&rsquo;t answer:</p>
<ul>
<li>Tweeted by who? What about bots?</li>
<li>Tweeted how? Original Tweets? Retweets?</li>
<li>What was tweeted? The DOI? The article landing page? Was there extra text?</li>
<li>When did the tweet occur?</li>
</ul>
<p>We took one step closer toward the right question. Instead of asking &ldquo;how many tweets for this article are there as of today&rdquo; we asked:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;What activity is happening on Twitter concerning this article?&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If we record each activity we can include information that answers all of the above questions. So instead of collecting data like this:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Registered Content</th>
<th>Source</th>
<th>Count</th>
<th>Date</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>10.5555/12345678</td>
<td>twitter</td>
<td>20</td>
<td>2017-01-01</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10.5555/87654321</td>
<td>twitter</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>2017-01-15</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10.5555/12345678</td>
<td>twitter</td>
<td>23</td>
<td>2017-02-01</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>We&rsquo;re collecting data like this:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Subject</th>
<th>Relation</th>
<th>Object</th>
<th>Source</th>
<th>Date</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>twitter.com/tweet/1234</td>
<td>references</td>
<td>10.5555/12345678</td>
<td>twitter</td>
<td>2017-01-01</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>twitter.com/tweet/5678</td>
<td>references</td>
<td>10.5555/987654321</td>
<td>twitter</td>
<td>2017-01-11</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>twitter.com/tweet/9123</td>
<td>references</td>
<td>10.5555/12345678</td>
<td>twitter</td>
<td>2017-02-06</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Now we&rsquo;re collecting individual links between tweets and DOIs, we&rsquo;re closer to all the other kinds of links that we store. It&rsquo;s like the &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; links that we already curate except:</p>
<ol>
<li>It&rsquo;s not provided by publishers, we have to go and collect it ourselves.</li>
<li>It comes from a very diverse range of places, e.g. Twitter, Wikipedia, Blogs, Reddit, random web pages</li>
<li>The places that the Events do come from don&rsquo;t play by the normal rules. <strong>Web pages work differently to articles.</strong></li>
</ol>
<h2 id="non-traditional-publishing-is-untraditional">Non-traditional Publishing is Untraditional</h2>
<p>This last point caused us to scratch our heads for a bit. We used to collect links within the &lsquo;traditional&rsquo; scholarly literature. Generally, journal articles:</p>
<ul>
<li>get published once</li>
<li>have a publisher looking after them, who can produce structured metadata</li>
<li>are subject to a formal process of retractions or updates</li>
</ul>
<p>Now we&rsquo;re collecting links between things that aren&rsquo;t seen as &lsquo;traditional&rsquo; scholarship and don&rsquo;t play by the rules.</p>
<p>The first thing we found is that blog authors don&rsquo;t reference the literature using DOIs. Instead they use article landing pages. This meant that we had to put in the work to collect links to article landing pages and turn them back into DOIs so that they can be referenced in a stable, link-rot-proof way.</p>
<p>When we looked at Wikipedia we noticed that, as pages are edited, references are added and removed all the time. If our data set reflected this, it would have to evolve over time, with items popping into existence and then vanishing again. This isn&rsquo;t good.</p>
<p>Our position in the scholarly community is to provide data and infrastructure that others can use to create services, enrich and build things. Curating an ever changing data set, where things can disappear, is not a great idea and is hard to work with.</p>
<p>We realised that a plain old link store (also known as an assertion store, triple store, etc.) wasn&rsquo;t the right approach as it didn&rsquo;t capture the nuance in the data with sufficient transparency. At least, it didn&rsquo;t tell the whole picture.</p>
<p>We settled on a new architecture, and Crossref Event Data as we now know it was born. Instead of a dataset that changes over time, we have a continual stream of Events, where each Event tells a new part of the story. An Event is true at the time it is published, but if we find new information we don&rsquo;t edit Events, we add new ones.</p>
<p>An Event is the way that we tell you that we observed a link. It includes the link, in &ldquo;subject - relation type - object&rdquo; format, but so much more. We realised that one question won&rsquo;t do, so Events now answer the following questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>What links to what?</li>
<li>How was the link made? Was it with a article&rsquo;s DOI or straight to an Article landing page?</li>
<li>Which Agent collected it?</li>
<li>Which data source were they looking at?</li>
<li>When was the link observed?</li>
<li>When do we think the link actually happened?</li>
<li>What algorithms were used to collect it?</li>
<li>How do you know?</li>
</ul>
<p>I&rsquo;ll come back to the &ldquo;how do you know&rdquo; a bit later.</p>
<h2 id="what-is-an-altmetrics-event">What is an altmetrics Event?</h2>
<p>So, an Event is a package that contains a link plus lots of extra information required to interpret and make sense of it. But how do we choose what comprises an Event?</p>
<p>An Event is created every time we notice an interaction between something we can observe out on the web and a piece of registered content. This simple description gives rise to some interesting quirks.</p>
<p>It means that every time we see a tweet that mentions an article, for example, we create an Event. If a tweet mentions two articles, there are two events. That means that &ldquo;the number of Twitter events&rdquo; is not the same as &ldquo;the number of tweets&rdquo;.</p>
<p>It means that every time we see a link to a piece of registered content in a webpage, we create an Event. The Event Data system currently tries to visit each webpage once, but we reserve the right to visit a webpage more than once. This means that the number of Events for a particular webpage doesn&rsquo;t mean there are that many references.</p>
<p>We might go back and check a webpage in future to see if it still has the same links. If it does, we might generate a new set of Events to indicate that.</p>
<p>Because of the evolving nature of Wikipedia, we attempt to visit every page revision and document the links we find. This means that if an article has a very active edit history, and therefore a large number of edits, we will see repeated Events to the literature, once for every version of the page that makes references. So the number of Events in Wikipedia doesn&rsquo;t mean the number of references.</p>
<p>An Event is created every time we notice an interaction. Each source (Reddit, Wikipedia, Twitter, blogs, the web at large) has different quirks, and you need to understand the underlying source in order to understand the Events.</p>
<h2 id="we-put-the-choice-into-your-hands">We put the choice into your hands.</h2>
<p>If you want to create a metric based on counting things, you have a lot of decisions to make. Do you care about bots? Do you care about citation rings? Do you care about retweets? Do you care about whether people use DOIs or article landing pages? Do you care what text people included in their tweet? The answer to each of these questions means that you&rsquo;ll have to look at each data point and decide to put a weighting or score on it.</p>
<p>If you wanted to measure how blogged about a particular article was, you would have to look at the blogs to work out if they all had unique content. For example, Google&rsquo;s Blogger platform can publish the same blog post under multiple domain names.</p>
<p>A blog full of link spam is still a blog. You may be doing a study into reputable blogs, so you may want to whitelist the set of domain names to exclude less reputable blogs. Or you may be doing a study into blog spam, so lower quality blogs is precisely what you&rsquo;re interested in,</p>
<p>If you wanted to measure how discussed an article was on Reddit, you might want to go to the conversation and see if people were actually talking about it, or whether it was an empty discussion. You might want to look at the author of the post to see if they were a regular poster, whether they were a bot or an active member of the community.</p>
<p>If you wanted to measure how referenced an article was in Wikipedia, you might want to look at the history of each reference to see if it was deleted immediately. Or if it existed for 50% of the time, and to give a weighting.</p>
<p>We don&rsquo;t do any scoring, we just record everything we observe. We know that everyone will have different needs, be producing different outcomes and use different methodologies. So it&rsquo;s important that we tell you everything we know.</p>
<p>So that&rsquo;s an Event. It&rsquo;s not just a link, it&rsquo;s the observation of a link, coupled with extra information to help you understand it.</p>
<h2 id="how-do-you-know">How do you know?</h2>
<p>But what if the Event isn&rsquo;t enough? To come back to the earlier question, &ldquo;how do you know?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Events don&rsquo;t exist in isolation. Data must be collected and processed. Each Agent in Crossref Event Data monitors a particular data source and feeds data into the system, which goes and retrieves webpages so it can make observations. Things can go wrong.</p>
<p>Any one of these things might prevent an Event from being collected:</p>
<ul>
<li>We might not know about a particular DOI prefix immediately after it&rsquo;s registered.</li>
<li>We might not know about a particular landing page domain for a new member immediately.</li>
<li>Article landing pages might not have the right metadata, so we can&rsquo;t match them to DOIs.</li>
<li>Article landing pages might block the Crossref bot, so we can&rsquo;t match DOIs.</li>
<li>Article landing pages might require cookies, or convoluted JavaScript, so the bot can&rsquo;t get the content.</li>
<li>Blogs and webpages might require cookies or JavaScript to execute.</li>
<li>Blogs might block the Event Data bot.</li>
<li>A particular API might have been unavailable for a period of time.</li>
<li>We didn&rsquo;t know about a particular blog newsfeed at the time.</li>
</ul>
<p>This is a fact of life, and we can only operate on a best-effort basis. If we don&rsquo;t have an Event, it doesn&rsquo;t mean it didn&rsquo;t happen.</p>
<p>This doesn&rsquo;t mean that we just give up. Our system generates copious logs. It details every API call it made, the response it got, every scan it made, every URL it looked at. This amounts to about a gigabyte of data per day. If you want to find out why there was no Wikipedia data at a given point in time, you can go back to the log data and see what happened. If you want to see why there was no Event for an article by publisher X, you can look at the logs and see, for example, that Publisher X prevented the bot from visiting.</p>
<p>Every Event that does exist has a link to an Evidence Record, which corresponds with the logs. The Evidence Record tells you:</p>
<ul>
<li>which version of the Agent was running</li>
<li>which Artifacts and versions it was working from</li>
<li>which API requests were made</li>
<li>which inputs looked like possible links</li>
<li>which matched or failed</li>
<li>which Events were generated</li>
</ul>
<p>Artifacts are versioned files that contain information that Agents use. For example, there&rsquo;s a list of domain names, a list of DOI prefixes, a list of blog feed urls, and so on. By indicating which version of these Artifacts were used, we can explain why we visited a certain domain and not another.</p>
<p>All the code is open source. The Evidence Record says which version of each Agent was running so you can see precisely which algorithms were used to generate the data.</p>
<p>Between the Events, Evidence Records, Evidence Logs, Artifacts and Open Source software, we can pinpoint precisely how the system behaved and why. If you have any questions about how a given Event was (or wasn&rsquo;t) generated, every byte of explanation is freely available.</p>
<p>This forms our &ldquo;Transparency first&rdquo; idea. We start the whole process with an open Artifact Registry. Open source software then produces open Evidence Records. The Evidence Record is then consulted and turned into Events. All the while, copious logs are being generated. We&rsquo;ve designed the system to be transparent, and for each step to be open to inspection.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;re currently in Beta. We have over thirty million Events in our API, and they&rsquo;re just waiting for you to use them!</p>
<p>Head over to the <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/">User Guide</a> and get stuck in!</p>
<p>If you are in Toronto, come and say hi to Maddy or me.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/joe-wass/"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/staff/joe_720px.jpg" width="200px"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/madeleine-watson/"><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/staff/maddy17-720px.png" width="200px"></a></p>
Organization Identifier Working Group Updatehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/organization-identifier-working-group-update/
Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/organization-identifier-working-group-update/<p>About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID <a href="https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organization-identifier-project-way-forward">announced a joint initiative</a> to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. Today we publish governance recommendations and product principles and requirements for the creation of an open, independent organization identifier registry and invite community feedback.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://orcid.org/content/organization-identifier-working-group">Organization Identifier (OrgID) Working Group</a> was established as <a href="https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organization-identifier-project-way-forward">a joint effort by Crossref, DataCite and ORCID</a> in January 2017. The members of the group bring a broad range of experience and perspectives, including expertise in research data discovery, data management, persistent identifiers, economics research, funding, archiving, non-profit membership organizations, academia, publishing, and metadata development.</p>
<p>The Working Group was charged with refining the structure, principles, and technology specifications for an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.</p>
<p>The group has been working in three interdependent areas: Governance, Registry Product Definition, and Business Model &amp; Funding, and today releases for public comment its findings and recommendations for governance and product requirements.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://figshare.com/articles/ORG_ID_WG_Governance_Principles_and_Recommendations/5402002/1">Governance Recommendations</a> - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402002.v1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402002.v1</a><br></li>
<li><a href="https://figshare.com/articles/ORG_ID_WG_Product_Principles_and_Recommendations/5402047/1">Product Principles and Recommendations</a> - <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402047.v1">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.23640/07243.5402047.v1</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We invite your feedback!</p>
<p>Please <a href="mailto:oi-project@orcid.org">send comments</a> by October 15th, 2017.</p>PIDapalooza is back and wants your PID storieshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/pidapalooza-is-back-and-wants-your-pid-stories/
Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/pidapalooza-is-back-and-wants-your-pid-stories/<p>Now in its second year, this “open festival of persistent identifiers” brings together people from all walks of life who have something to say about PIDs. If you work with them, develop with them, measure or manage them, let us know your PID adventures, pitfalls, and plans by submitting a talk by September 18. It&rsquo;ll be in Girona, Spain, January 23-24, 2018.</p>
<p>One of the great strengths of last year’s PIDapalooza was the number of people who spoke and all the conversations that were kindled. <strong>So if you&rsquo;re thinking of going, we encourage you to <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdR7TGVGMRUVVgMejMqJhgKa8xdL-GDGyv97g_RSRumBAjgTg/viewform">propose a talk</a>, so we can hear what you&rsquo;re working on and you can get some feedback</strong>.</p>
<p>At the inaugural PIDapalooza event Crossref took to the stage twice, with Ed Pentz covering Org IDs and Joe Wass talking about Event Data.</p>
<p>Here we have Joe’s memories of the event and Ed’s update on the Org ID status.</p>
<h3 id="joe-wass-reflects">Joe Wass reflects:</h3>
<p>At Crossref, the subject of Persistent Identifiers is something we care deeply about, and linking between DOIs, ORCID iDs and other identifiers is the reason we get up in the morning. But a whole conference dedicated to them? If I&rsquo;m honest, the first time I heard about PIDapalooza I thought the subject was rather niche.</p>
<p>How wrong I was. It turns out there are people from all walks of life who care about &ldquo;things&rdquo; using persistent identifiers to link, describe and reference them. There was a great balance between presenters and attendees, and the programme meant that lots of people had a chance to speak. We heard about identifiers for research vessels, pieces of scientific equipment, individual bottles of milk, plus the usual subjects like scholarly publishing, datasets, organisations and funders, and how to cite them.</p>
<p>Between sessions we chatted over a wide range of subjects, noted similarities between subject areas, offered advice and exchanged ideas. Who knew this stuff was all related?</p>
<h3 id="ed-pentz-on-plans-for-the-new-pid-on-the-block-organization-ids">Ed Pentz on plans for the new PID on the block - Organization IDs</h3>
<p>An important presentation at the 2016 PIDapalooza meeting was on organization identifiers. A week before the conference Crossref, DataCite and ORCID released three documents for public comment outlining a proposed way forward. The goal is launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. At the packed PIDapalooza session Crossref, DataCite and ORCID gave an update on their work over the previous year and their proposals going forward.</p>
<p>There was a lively discussion and debate about the issues. Following the meeting the three organizations set up the OI Project Working Group with a broad group of stakeholders. The group has been meeting over the last year and will release two documents next week - a set of Governance Recommendations and Product Principles and Recommendations for community feedback. So watch this space.</p>
<p>The PIDapalooza conference really helped galvanize the work in this area by bringing together a broad range of people interested in persistent identifiers. If you have an idea about PIDs, please come and tell us about it.</p>
<hr />
<p>Check out the <a href="https://pidapalooza.figshare.com/">decks from last year&rsquo;s talks</a>, the <a href="https://www.pidapalooza.org/">PIDapalooza website</a> with all the info, and <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdR7TGVGMRUVVgMejMqJhgKa8xdL-GDGyv97g_RSRumBAjgTg/viewform">sumbit a proposal for your talk before September 18</a>.</p>Making peer reviews citable, discoverable, and creditablehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/making-peer-reviews-citable-discoverable-and-creditable/
Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/making-peer-reviews-citable-discoverable-and-creditable/<p>A number of our members have asked if they can register their peer reviews with us. They believe that discussions around scholarly works should have DOIs and be citable to provide further context and provenance for researchers reading the article. To that end, we can announce some pertinent news as we enter <a href="https://peerreviewweek.wordpress.com" target="_blank">Peer Review Week 2017</a>: Crossref infrastructure is soon to be extended to manage DOIs for peer reviews. Launching next month will be support for this new content type, with schema specifically dedicated to the reviews and discussions of scholarly content.</p>
<p>Not disimilar to other registered resources (datasets, working papers, preprints, translations, etc.) publication peer reviews are important scholarly contributions in their own right and form a part of the scholarly record. In addition to the members who have been registering them, many more are looking to better handle these contributions and give recognition to this process which is so critical to maintaining scientific quality.</p>
<p>Here are a few examples of existing Crossref DOIs for peer reviews: <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/j.engfracmech.2015.01.019">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1016/j.engfracmech.2015.01.019</a> and <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5194/wes-1-177-2016">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5194/wes-1-177-2016</a> and <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14322/PUBLONS.R518142">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.14322/PUBLONS.R518142</a>.</p>
<p>We are extending our infrastructure to support all members who make these scholarly discussions available to readers. To accommodate a wide range of publisher practices, this will include a range of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history, across any and all review rounds, including referee reports, decision letters, and author responses. Members will be able to include not only scholarly discussions of journal articles before but also after publication (e.g. “post-publication reviews”).</p>
<p>Central to this new feature of the Crossref <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/content-registration">Content Registration</a> service is the special set of metadata dedicated to supporting the discovery and investigation of peer reviews as it is linked up to the article discussed. The peer review schema will provide a characterization of the peer review asset (for example: recommendation, type, license, contributor info, competing interests) as well as offer a view into the review process (e.g. pre/post-publication, revision round, review date).</p>
<h3 id="our-custom-support-for-peer-reviews-will-ensure-that">Our custom support for peer reviews will ensure that:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Readers can see provenance and get context of a work</li>
<li>Links to this content persist over time</li>
<li>The metadata is useful</li>
<li>They are connected to the full history of the published results</li>
<li>Contributors are given credit for their work (we will ask for ORCID iDs)</li>
<li>The citation record is clear and up-to-date.</li>
</ul>
<p>As with all the content registered with Crossref, we will make peer review metadata available for machine and human access, across multiple interfaces (e.g. <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">REST API</a>, <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/213679866-OAI-PMH-subscriber-only-">OAI-PMH</a>, <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/">Crossref Metadata Search</a>) to enable discoverability across the research ecosystem. This metadata may also support enrichment of scholarly discussion, reviewer accountability, publishing transparency, analysis or research on peer reviews, and so on.</p>
<p>To reflect the nature of this special content, we will bundle the fees for peer review content fees into the cost of registering the article for members who publish the journal article and its peer reviews. No matter how many reviews are associated with a paper, there will be a fixed fee for the full set.</p>
<p>Peer review infrastructure will arrive at Crossref in one month, and we are excited to engage our members who want to assign DOIs to peer reviews or migrate previously registered review content to the new schema. A special thanks to the members so far who have given feedback and advice to develop the schema: BMC, The BMJ, Copernicus, eLife, PeerJ, and Publons.</p>
<p>Please contact our <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">member services team</a> if you&rsquo;d like to know more.</p>More metadata for machines-citations, relations, and preprints arrive in the REST APIhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/more-metadata-for-machines-citations-relations-and-preprints-arrive-in-the-rest-api/
Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Kirsty Meddingshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/more-metadata-for-machines-citations-relations-and-preprints-arrive-in-the-rest-api/<p>Over the past few months we have been adding to the metadata and functionality of our <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu" target="_blank">REST API</a>, Crossref’s public machine interface for the metadata of all 90 million+ registered content items. Much of the work focused on a review and upgrade of the API’s code and architecture in order to better support its rapidly growing usage. But we have also extended the <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/blob/master/api_format.md" target="_blank">types of metadata</a> that the API can deliver.</p>
<p>One of the biggest changes is that <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/reference-linking/">references</a> are now available if the publisher has made them public (a simple <a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">email instruction</a> to us). Currently 45% of all publications with deposited references are now accessible. For example:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://0-doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1073/pnas.1402289111">This article</a> studying fluid ejection from animals has 55 references and they are all in the <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1073/pnas.1402289111">metadata here</a>. You can also see that the article has an <code>is-referenced-by</code> count of 6.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0070585">This article</a> exploring whether people bitten by their cat are more likely to develop depression has 142 references and is <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1371/journal.pone.0070585">referenced by 12</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>We recently announced that we would be <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/preprints-are-go-at-crossref/">accepting preprints</a>, and the metadata for 15,000 preprints <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works?facet=type-name:*&amp;rows=0">registered to date</a> is now in the API, labelled as <code>posted-content</code>. Over 4,000 have been subsequently published in a journal, and the Crossref metadata now links these preprints to their respective articles (and vice versa). For example <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1101/098947">this article</a> in Biorxiv has since been <a href="http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1093/molbev/msx056">published in a journal</a>, and this relationship is recorded in its <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1101/098947">metadata</a> as <code>is-preprint-of</code>.</p>
<h3 id="also-new-to-the-api">Also new to the API:</h3>
<ul>
<li><p>Cited-by counts - the number of times each work has been referenced by other content registered with us. Look for <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1063/1.4870777"><code>is-referenced-by-count</code></a> within a record.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1038/171737a0">This article</a> from 1953 about a fairly notable discovery has been <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1038/171737a0">cited 4832 times</a>, but the two <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1038/227680a0">most</a> <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.1016/0003-2697(76)90527-3">cited</a> articles both have over 100,000 citations and thousands have been cited more than Watson and Crick.</p></li>
<li><p>Abstracts for over <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works?query=has-abstract:true&amp;rows=0">1 million works</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>Similarity Check URLs&ndash;the ones that Turnitin crawl to add content to the database&ndash;are now showing so that participating publishers can check that they are including them in their <a href="https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/v1/works/10.5740/jaoacint.10-223">metadata deposits</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>Subject categories have been added for an additional 7000 journal titles, taking the total number of classified titles to ~45,000.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Are you already using our Metadata APIs for your system or project? We’re always keen to <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">hear new use cases and happy to answer any questions</a>.</p>
<p><em>You may need to install a JSON viewer extension in your browser to render API queries in a human-friendly way.</em></p>Using the Crossref REST API. Part 5 (with OpenCitations)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-5-with-opencitations/
Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000Christine Cormack Woodccormackwoodhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-5-with-opencitations/<p>As part of our <a href="https://crossref.org/categories/api-case-study/">blog post series on the Crossref REST API</a>, we talked to Silvio Peroni and David Shotton of OpenCitations (OC) about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using the Crossref REST API as part of their workflow.</p>
<p><strong>Introducing OpenCitations</strong></p>
<p>OpenCitations employs Semantic Web technologies to create an open repository of the citation data that publishers have made available. This repository, called the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), contains RDF-based scholarly citation data that are made freely available so that others may use and build upon them. All the resources published by OC – namely the data within the OCC, the ontologies describing the data, and the software developed to build the OCC – are available to the public with open licenses.</p>
<p><strong>What problem is your service trying to solve?</strong></p>
<p>OC was started to address the lack of RDF-based open citation data. To our knowledge, when the project formally started with Jisc funding in 2010 the prototype OCC was the first RDF-based dataset of open citation data.</p>
<p>We collect accurate scholarly citation data derived from bibliographic references harvested from the scholarly literature, so as to make them available under a Creative Commons public domain dedication (CC0) by means of Semantic Web technologies, thus making them findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable, as well as structured, separable, and open.</p>
<p>OCC citation data are described using standard and/or well-known vocabularies, including the<a href="http://www.sparontologies.net/"> SPAR Ontologies</a> ,<a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/"> PROV-O</a>, the<a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat"> Data Catalog Vocabulary,</a> and<a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/void"> VoID</a>. The use of such vocabulary is described in the<a href="https://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443876"> OCC metadata document</a>, and is implemented by means of the<a href="https://w3id.org/oc/ontology"> OpenCitations Ontology</a> (OCO).</p>
<p>The OCC resources are made available and accessible in different ways, so as to facilitate their reuse in different contexts:<a href="http://opencitations.net/download"> as monthly dumps</a>, via the<a href="https://w3id.org/oc/sparql"> SPARQL</a> endpoint, and by accessing them directly by means of the HTTP URIs of the stored resources (via content negotiation;<a href="https://w3id.org/oc/corpus/br/1"> example</a>)</p>
<p><strong>Can you tell us how you are using the Crossref Metadata API at OpenCitations?</strong></p>
<p>At present, basic citation information is retrieved from PubMed Central, and the Crossref API is then used to retrieve additional metadata describing the citing and cited articles, and to disambiguate bibliographic resources and agents by means of the identifiers retrieved (e.g., DOI, ISSN, ISBN, URL, and Crossref member URL). In future, we will retrieve full citation data direct from Crossref.</p>
<p><strong>What metadata values do you pull from the API?</strong></p>
<p>We pull the titles, subtitles, identifiers (e.g. DOI, ISSN, ISBN, URL, and Crossref member URL), author list, publisher, container resources (issue, volume, journal, book, etc.), publication year and pages.</p>
<p><strong>Have you built your own interface to extract this data?</strong></p>
<p>The SPAR Citation Indexer, a.k.a.<a href="https://w3id.org/oc/paper/spacin-demo-ekaw2016.html"> SPACIN</a>, is a script and a series of Python classes that allow one to process particular JSON files containing the bibliographic reference lists of papers, produced from the PubMed Central API by another script included in the <a href="https://github.com/essepuntato/opencitations">OpenCitations GitHub repository.</a></p>
<p>SPACIN processes such JSON files and retrieves additional metadata information about all the citing and cited articles by querying the Crossref API, among others. Once SPACIN has retrieved all these metadata, RDF resources are created (or reused, if they have been already added in the past) and stored in the file system in JSON-LD format. In addition, they are also uploaded to the OCC triplestore (via the SPARQL UPDATE protocol).</p>
<p><strong>How often do you extract/query data?</strong></p>
<p>The entire OpenCitations ingestion workflow is running continuously, processing about half a million citations per month.</p>
<p><strong>What do you do with the metadata once it’s pulled from the API?</strong></p>
<p>All the metadata relevant to bibliographic entities are stored by using the<a href="https://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443876"> OCC metadata model</a>. The ontological terms of such metadata model are collected within an ontology called the OpenCitations Ontology (OCO), which includes several terms from the SPAR Ontologies and other vocabularies. In particular, the following six bibliographic entity types occur in the datasets created by SPACIN:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>bibliographic resources (br), class fabio:Expression – resources that either cite or are cited by other bibliographic resources (e.g. journal articles), or that contain such citing/cited resources (e.g. journals);</p></li>
<li><p>resource embodiments (re), class fabio:Manifestation – details of the physical or digital forms in which the bibliographic resources are made available by their publishers;</p></li>
<li><p>bibliographic entries (be), class biro:BibliographicReference – literal textual bibliographic entries occurring in the reference lists of bibliographic resources;</p></li>
<li><p>responsible agents (ra), class foaf:Agent – names of agents having certain roles with respect to the bibliographic resources (i.e. names of authors, editors, publishers, etc.);</p></li>
<li><p>agent roles (ar), class pro:RoleInTime – roles held by agents with respect to the bibliographic resources (e.g. author, editor, publisher);</p></li>
<li><p>identifiers (id), class datacite:Identifier – external identifiers (e.g. DOI, ORCID, PubMedID) associated to bibliographic resources and agents.</p></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Do you have plans to enhance your metadata input?</strong></p>
<p>We already handle additional information, such as ORCIDs, that are extracted by means of the ORCID API applied to the citing and cited articles included in the OCC. In addition, we are developing scripts in order to use all the new citation data Crossref now makes available as consequence of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).</p>
<p><strong>What are the future plans for OpenCitations?</strong></p>
<p>With funding received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we will shortly extend the current infrastructure and the rate of data ingest. Our immediate goal is to increment the daily ingestion of citation data from about half a million citations per month to about half a million citations per day. In addition, we plan to analyse the OCC so as to understand the quality of its current data, and to develop new user interfaces, including graph visualizations of citation networks, that will expand the means whereby users can interact with the OpenCitations data.</p>
<p><strong>What else would you like to see our REST API offer?</strong></p>
<p>Categorising articles/journals/any bibliographic resources according to their main discipline (Computer Science, Biology, etc.) and, eventually, by means of subject terms and/or keywords. Additionally, provision of authors&rsquo; institutional affiliations and funder information would be extremely valuable.</p>
<p>Thank you Silvio and David!</p>
<p>If you are keen to share what you’re doing with the our Metadata APIs, contact <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">feedback@crossref.org</a> and share your story.</p>LIVE17 in Singapore is taking shape!https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/live17-in-singapore-is-taking-shape/
Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/live17-in-singapore-is-taking-shape/<p>Our annual meeting on 14th and 15th November, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">LIVE17</a> is shaping up nicely with an exciting line-up of respected speakers talking around the theme of “Metadata + Infrastructure + Relations = Context”, with each half day covering some element of the main theme.</p>
<ul>
<li>Day one, AM: <em>Metadata enables connections</em></li>
<li>Day one, PM: <em>How research and infrastructure is changing</em></li>
<li>Day two, AM: <em>Social challenges in the scholarly community</em></li>
<li>Day two, PM: <em>Who is using your metadata and what are they doing with it?</em></li>
</ul>
<p>This years updated format means both days will be packed with a mixture of plenary and breakout sessions and interactive activities. A cocktail reception with entertainment will be held in the Grand Marquee on the first evening.</p>
<p>A comprehensive agenda of the two-day event will be available shortly, but in the meantime we’ve provided a few talk teasers from six of our plenary speakers to whet your appetite:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th align="left">Speaker</th>
<th align="left">Title and Organization</th>
<th align="left">Talk title</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="left"><a href="#TB">Theodora Bloom</a></td>
<td align="left">Executive Editor, The BMJ</td>
<td align="left">Preparing to handle dynamic scholarly content: Are we ready?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><a href="#CG">Casey Green</a></td>
<td align="left">Assistant Professor, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania</td>
<td align="left">Research and literature parasites in a culture of sharing.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><a href="#LT">Leonid Teytelman</a></td>
<td align="left">Co-founder and CEO, Protocols.io</td>
<td align="left">A call to reduce random collisions with information; we can automatically connect scientists to the knowledge that they need.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><a href="#NB">Nicholas Bailey</a></td>
<td align="left">Data Science Team, Royal Society of Chemistry</td>
<td align="left">What does data science tell us about social challenges in scholarly publishing?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><a href="#MV">Miguel Escobar Varela</a></td>
<td align="left">Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore</td>
<td align="left">Digital Humanities in Singapore: some thoughts for the future.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><a href="#KW">Kuansan Wang</a></td>
<td align="left">Managing Director, Microsoft Research Outreach</td>
<td align="left">Democratize access to scholarly knowledge with AI.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br><br></p>
<p><a id="TB"></a></p>
<h3 id="theodora-bloom-preparing-to-handle-dynamic-scholarly-content-are-we-ready">Theodora Bloom - Preparing to handle dynamic scholarly content: Are we ready?</h3>
<p>Historically, journals might expect a few &lsquo;Letters to the Editor&rdquo; to discuss &lsquo;matters arising&rsquo; after an article was published. But scholarly communications are becoming much more dynamic, with versions posted as &lsquo;preprints&rsquo; before publication, corrections after publication, and potentially multiple versions of the same study appearing at different times. How should we handle this changing landscape for the benefits of researchers and consumers of the literature?</p>
<h3 id="about-theodora-bloom">About Theodora Bloom</h3>
<p>Theodora Bloom has been executive editor of The BMJ since June 2014. She has a PhD in developmental cell biology from the University of Cambridge and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. She moved into publishing as an editor on the biology team at Nature, and in 1992 joined the fledgling journal Current Biology. After a number of years helping to develop Current Biology and its siblings Structure and Chemistry &amp; Biology, Theo joined the beginnings of the open access movement. As the founding editor of Genome Biology she was closely involved in the birth of the commercial open access publisher BioMed Central. She joined the non-profit open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2008, first as chief editor of PLOS Biology and later as biology editorial director. She took the lead for PLOS on issues around data access and availability and launched PLOS&rsquo;s data sharing policy. At The BMJ she is responsible for operations, delivering the journal online and in print.</p>
<hr />
<p><a id="CG"></a></p>
<h3 id="casey-greene-research-and-literature-parasites-in-a-culture-of-sharing">Casey Greene - Research and literature parasites in a culture of sharing.</h3>
<p>Casey has been a strong champion of preprints and will discuss his efforts in this area including resources that he has shared to help advance the spread of preprints not only amongst researchers but publishers. These include letters to respond to journals that invite reviews but have unclear preprint policies. His lab members have also analyzed the licensing of preprints and the coverage of literature provided by the pirate repository, Sci-Hub. His talk will touch on each of these areas, and also a discussion of the Research Parasite and Symbiont Awards, which aim to advance recognition for data sharing and reuse.</p>
<h3 id="about-casey-greene">About Casey Greene</h3>
<p>Casey is an assistant professor in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Childhood Cancer Data Lab for Alex&rsquo;s Lemonade Stand Foundation. His lab develops deep learning methods that integrate distinct large-scale datasets to extract the rich and intrinsic information embedded in such integrated data. Before starting the Integrative Genomics Lab in 2012, Casey earned his PhD for his study of gene-gene interactions in the field of computational genetics from Dartmouth College in 2009 and moved to the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow from 2009-2012. The overarching theme of his work has been the development and evaluation of methods that acknowledge the emergent complexity of biological systems.</p>
<hr />
<p><a id="LT"></a></p>
<h3 id="leonid-teytelman-call-to-reduce-random-collisions-with-information-we-can-automatically-connect-scientists-to-the-knowledge-that-they-need">Leonid Teytelman - Call to reduce random collisions with information; we can automatically connect scientists to the knowledge that they need.</h3>
<p>Every scientist knows that virtually all papers, including their own, contain mistakes. A key motivation for creating protocols.io was to make it possible to share corrections and optimizations of published research protocols and to have this information automatically reach the scientists using these methods. While pushing relevant knowledge to the users is built into all aspects of protocols.io, we can do a lot more. If publishers, Crossref, and reference management platforms collaborate, we can move beyond the search towards a point where important information automatically reaches the appropriate researchers.</p>
<h3 id="about-leonid-lenny-teytelman">About Leonid (Lenny) Teytelman</h3>
<p>Lenny is the Co-founder and CEO of protocols.io, an open access platform to share and discover research protocols. It enables scientists to make, exchange, improve and discuss protocols and it is poised to dramatically accelerate and to increase reproducibility of scientific research. Lenny did his graduate studies at UC Berkeley and finished his postdoctoral research at MIT. Lenny has a strong passion for sharing science and improving research efficiency through technology.</p>
<hr />
<p><a id="NB"></a></p>
<h3 id="nicholas-bailey-what-does-data-science-tell-us-about-social-challenges-in-scholarly-publishing">Nicholas Bailey - What does data science tell us about social challenges in scholarly publishing?</h3>
<p>How can we facilitate the fair advancement and dissemination of knowledge? The risks and shortcomings within scholarly publishing are always under scrutiny, but some problems don’t seem to be going away. What should we do about obvious gender inequality within some disciplines, or the weight given to Impact Factor as a measure of quality? The Royal Society of Chemistry has a royal charter to publish scientific content in a way that serves the public interest, and as such its Data Science team devotes part of its time to analysing the social challenges facing scholarly publishing. In this talk, Nicholas Bailey will share some examples.</p>
<h3 id="about-nicholas-bailey">About Nicholas Bailey</h3>
<p>Nicholas Bailey is a web analytics expert, a swimmer, a father, and a data geek. After spending several years in the Marketing team at the Royal Society of Chemistry, ultimately managing the database marketing team, he moved out of Marketing and into the Data Science team in order to work more closely with agile teams of developers and strengthen his data analysis and coding skills. Nicholas has a lot to say about measuring digital products, machine learning, and the potential of data science to contribute to positive social outcomes.</p>
<hr />
<p><a id="MV"></a></p>
<h3 id="miguel-escobar-varela-digital-humanities-in-singapore-some-thoughts-for-the-future">Miguel Escobar Varela - Digital Humanities in Singapore: some thoughts for the future.</h3>
<p>Singapore-based researchers from a variety of disciplines are currently using digital tools to study the humanities, in areas as diverse as history and dance studies. This talk will present an overview of current projects and suggest a path for the growth of this field in Singapore. It argues that the future of DH requires better inter-institutional infrastructure for long-term data storage, clearer protocols for interoperability and more freely available and reusable datasets. This is easier said than done, but looking at the examples of other countries can provide some sources for inspiration.</p>
<h3 id="about-miguel-escobar-varela">About Miguel Escobar Varela</h3>
<p>Miguel Escobar Varela is an assistant professor in the University Scholars Programme (USP) at the National University of Singapore. At the USP, Dr. Varela teaches in the domain of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a theatre researcher and software programmer. His interests are in teaching theatre through interactive websites and applying computational methods to study performances in Singapore and Indonesia.</p>
<hr />
<p><a id="KW"></a></p>
<h3 id="kuansan-wang-democratize-access-to-scholarly-knowledge-with-ai">Kuansan Wang - Democratize access to scholarly knowledge with AI.</h3>
<p>With the advent of big data and cloud computing, artificial intelligence has made tremendous strides in recent years. Not only has machine surpassed humans in playing the chess game Go and Jeopardy game shows, reports of superhuman performance in other highly cognitive tasks, ranging from image classification to speech recognition, also abound. Have we reached a stage where the advancements in AI can help tackle a problem in scientific pursuits, namely, the access and the dissemination of scholarly knowledge? This talk describes Microsoft Academic, a project inside Microsoft Research that uses the state-of-the-art AI in natural language understanding and knowledge acquisition to harvest knowledge from scholarly communications and make it available on the web. The talk will describe the technical challenges that have been overcome, the world-wide research collaborations that have since been enabled, and discuss the potentials of making knowledge more readily available to the mass.</p>
<h3 id="about-kuansan-wang">About Kuansan Wang</h3>
<p>Kuansan Wang is the Managing Director at Microsoft Research Outreach (MSR), where he started in March 1998 as a Researcher in the speech technology group working. In 2004, he moved to the speech product group and became a software architect where he helped create and ship the product Microsoft Speech Server, which is still powering the corporate call center for Microsoft. Since September 2007, he has been back at MSR, joining the newly founded Internet Service Research Center with a mission to revolutionize online services and make Web more intelligent. In March 2016, he took on an additional role as a Managing Director of MSR Outreach, an organization with the mission to serve the research community.</p>
<p><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">Read more about our annual events</a><br>
<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crossref-live17-singapore-november-14-15-crlive17-registration-34604951341?ref=ebtnebregn">Register now for LIVE17</a></p>Scenario planning for our futurehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/scenario-planning-for-our-future/
Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/scenario-planning-for-our-future/<p>Crossref is governed by a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/">board of directors</a> that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November. At the July meeting the board typically spends a significant amount of time on strategic planning in addition to its usual activities such as financial oversight, approving investment in new services based on staff and committee recommendations, reviewing and approving policies and fees for new and existing services and generally making sure Crossref is healthy and well run.</p>
<p>This year we worked with a facilitator to look farther into the future than normal using a technique called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenario_planning">scenario planning</a> to map out “strategic agendas” for the next five years. Scenario-based strategic planning doesn’t try to predict the future but allows us to be flexible in planning by looking at a range of different possible eventualities. This is particularly useful for Crossref because scholarly research and communications is changing rapidly and we operate in a very complex environment.</p>
<p>To prepare for the meeting our facilitator, Susan Stickely, prepared 12 “critical uncertainties” - impactful issues that could go either way and that will affect how Crossref works, its mission and even whether it needs to exist. To develop the critical uncertainties Susan interviewed Crossref staff, board members, general members and scholarly communications community influencers and we held a preparatory group exercise at the March board meeting. The critical uncertainties are:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Scholarly Communication Landscape</strong>: Increasing diversity? Or publishing disintermediated?</li>
<li><strong>Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence</strong>: Supporting? Or obsoleting the researcher and publishers?</li>
<li><strong>Policy and Regulation</strong>: Limiting? Or visionary?</li>
<li><strong>Financing of Scholarly Communication</strong>: Shrinking Pool? Or Expanding Pool?</li>
<li><strong>Rise of Pre-print, New Content Sources</strong>: New, non-traditional? Or De-formalizing?</li>
<li><strong>Tracking and Privacy</strong>: Increased Privacy? Or Loss of Privacy?</li>
<li><strong>Cybersecurity</strong>: Secure? Or Vulnerable, Insecure?</li>
<li><strong>Publisher Sustainability</strong>: Slow Progress? Or Fast Progress?</li>
<li><strong>Impact of Open</strong>: Open or Closed? Or Slow to Change?</li>
<li><strong>Source of Prestige and Recognition</strong>: New Source? Or Publisher, Institution?</li>
<li><strong>Quality and Accuracy of Content</strong>: High? Or Low?</li>
<li><strong>Geopolitical Stability and Stance</strong>: Stable, Unified? Or Unstable, Fragmented</li>
</ol>
<p>In addition, from the interviews Susan was able to summarize Crossref’s distinctive competencies as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Having a reputation as a trusted, neutral one-stop source of metadata and services</li>
<li>Managing scholarly infrastructure with technical knowledge and innovation</li>
<li>Convening and facilitating scholarly communications community collaboration</li>
</ul>
<p>To be successful Crossref will need to continue to invest in, apply, and evolve these distinctive competencies and strategic dilemmas and challenges.</p>
<p>Over a day and half of discussions and breakout sessions the board and staff drew up a number of scenarios and created a draft strategic agenda for Crossref. Over the next couple of months we’ll be working on refining the strategic agenda and will be presenting the results to members in the next couple of months.</p>
<p>One theme that emerged is for Crossref to engage more with funders and build on the work with done with them in creating the Crossref Funder Registry. We have started a new <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/working-groups/funders">Funder Advisory Group</a> and, among other things, are working with them on a prototype for a new registry of grant identifiers.</p>
<p>In the regular board session the board approved three recommendations from the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/committees/membership-and-fees/">Membership and Fees Committee</a>:</p>
<ol>
<li>To approve the recommendations with respect to volume discounts for current deposits of posted content (i.e. preprints).</li>
<li>To create a new “peer review report” content type with a specific metadata schema and a bundled fee of $1.25 to be charged for a content item and all the reports associated with it.</li>
<li>To update the metadata delivery offering to have a single agreement that covers all metadata APIs/delivery routes, to adopt a single (updated) fee structure, and to remove case-by-case opt-outs for metadata.</li>
</ol>
<p>Item number 3 involves a number of big changes - for example the removal of the case-by-case opt outs requires a change to the main Membership Agreement - so we will be sending out more information to members and Affiliates in September and October about the changes and our implementation plans.</p>
<p>You can see the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/#motions">full history of the motions from every Board meeting</a> on our website.</p>
<p>Another major issue that the board discussed is the upcoming <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/elections/">election for the board of directors</a>. In order to broaden participation and be inclusive there was a new process this year. The Nominating Committee put out a call for expressions of interest for candidates to be on the slate for the election. We had a great response and there were 25 expressions of interest reviewed by the Nominating Committee who came up with a slate of nine excellent candidates for the six seats up for election. This is the first time that there are more candidates than seats on the slate so it’s particularly important for members to vote this year. See the recent <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2017-election-slate/">blog post about the election process and the slate</a> for more details.</p>
<p>The next board meeting is in November in conjunction with <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual/">Crossref LIVE17 in Singapore</a>.</p>Coming to a venue near youhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/coming-to-a-venue-near-you/
Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000Vanessa Fairhursthttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/coming-to-a-venue-near-you/<p>First of all – hello! I’m Vanessa. I’m fairly new to Crossref, having just joined our outreach team a few weeks ago. I previously worked in International Development, enabling individuals and institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America to access cutting edge scholarly research and knowledge, supporting national development and transforming lives.</p>
<p>A firm belief in the importance of connecting research and information around the world led me to Crossref where my role of International Community Outreach Manager connects me with a range of different people working across diverse disciplines and sectors. I’ll be supporting the coordination of our local LIVE events and helping to set up an ambassador program (more information on this coming soon) to deepen regional connections around the globe. You can read more about myself and my colleagues at Crossref on our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/people/">People</a> page.</p>
<p>As Crossref membership continues to grow globally, it becomes increasingly important for us to look at new ways to engage with our international membership base.</p>
<p>You may have heard about our LIVE local events, or even attended one in person before. These are free-to-attend, one day, regional events (local to you), providing a tailored program of activities which include information on the key concepts of Crossref, the services we offer and our future plans.</p>
<p>In the past year we have held LIVE local events in Brazil, Beijing, Boston and most recently Seoul. We also have a <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crossref-live-london-tickets-35757538761">London LIVE</a> event coming up soon. Next year we are aiming to be even more ambitious, hoping to expand our activities to a number of different countries around the world.</p>
<p><em>Images left to right, Crossref LIVE participants in Seoul, Crossref LIVE speakers in Brazil, and literature we use at our LIVE events</em></p>
<p>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/live-seoul2-2017.jpg" alt="Participants at Crossref LIVE Seoul" height="250px" width="300px"/>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/live-brazil2-2017.jpg" alt="Speakers at Crossref LIVE Brazil" height="250px" width="300px"/>|<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/live-literature2.jpg" alt="LIVE literature" height="250px" width="300px"/>|</p>
<p>When running our LIVE local events, we collaborate with local organizations to ensure they are appropriate, accessible, and applicable to the country context. Members support us by lending their local expertise with regards to venue selection, suggestions for speakers, tailored content, translation of materials and participant enrolment. We collaborate on logistics, content, Crossref speakers and the promotion of the event to our members and the wider community.</p>
<p>When running our LIVE local events, we collaborate with local organizations to ensure they are appropriate, accessible, and applicable to the country context. Members support us by lending their local expertise with regards to venue selection, suggestions for speakers, tailored content, translation of materials and participant enrollment. We collaborate on logistics, content, Crossref speakers and the promotion of the event to our members and the wider community.</p>
<p>We will release more information of upcoming regional events in due course, but we are working on the following countries as priorities for 2018-19:</p>
<ul>
<li>Asia-Pacific: Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia</li>
<li>Central Asia: India</li>
<li>Latin America: Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Brazil</li>
<li>Middle East: UAE (Dubai or Abu Dhabi)</li>
<li>Africa: South Africa, Kenya</li>
<li>Eastern Europe: Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Poland</li>
<li>Western Europe: Germany, Spain, UK</li>
<li>North America: Canada, USA</li>
</ul>
<p>If you are interested in hosting a LIVE local event or have any suggestions for one in your region, then we would love to hear from you. View more information on our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">LIVE locals</a> page or <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">contact us</a> to hear more or get involved.</p>
<hr />2017 election slatehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2017-election-slate/
Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/2017-election-slate/
<h3 id="slate-of-2017-board-candidates-announced-and-it-s-going-to-be-exciting">Slate of 2017 board candidates announced, and it’s going to be exciting</h3>
<p>Crossref is always evolving and the board knows it must evolve with us so we can continue to provide the right kind of services and support for you, as members of the research community.</p>
<p>This year two things happened for the first time: we used our updated bylaws <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/bylaws/">see article VII, section 2</a> agreed by the board last year, to allow more candidates than available seats; and secondly, to issue an <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/want-to-be-on-our-board">open call for expressions of interest</a>. Many members of the current board felt it was vital to move to this more transparent process.</p>
<p>With Crossref developing new services for new types of members at a rapid pace, it’s an exciting time to be on the board of directors. With 25 expressions of interest it seems we’re not the only ones who think so!</p>
<p>From these 25 applications, the Nominating Committee has proposed the following nine candidates to fill the six seats open for election to our board of directors:</p>
<p><strong>American Institute of Physics (AIP)</strong>, Jason Wilde, USA<br>
<strong>F1000 Research</strong>, Liz Allen, UK<br>
<strong>Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE)</strong>, Gerry Grenier, USA<br>
<strong>The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)</strong>, Vincent Cassidy, UK<br>
<strong>Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press)</strong>, Amy Brand, USA<br>
<strong>OpenEdition</strong>, Marin Dacos, France<br>
<strong>SciELO</strong>, Abel Packer, Brazil<br>
<strong>SPIE</strong>, Eric Pepper, USA<br>
<strong>Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Press (VGTU Press)</strong>, Eleonora Dagiene, Lithuania<br></p>
<h3 id="read-the-candidates-organizational-and-personal-statements-board-and-governance-elections-2017-slate"><a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance/elections/2017-slate">Read the candidates’ organizational and personal statements</a></h3>
<p><br>Candidates were chosen based on the following criteria:</p>
<ul>
<li>That board representation should be reflective of membership<br></li>
<li>A balance of types and sizes of organizations<br></li>
<li>That all committee choices and recommendations were unanimous<br></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="you-can-be-part-of-this-important-process-by-voting-in-the-election">You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election</h2>
<p>If your organization is a member of Crossref on September 15 2017, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 28 (affiliates, however, are not eligible to vote).</p>
<h2 id="how-can-you-vote">How can you vote?</h2>
<p>On September 28, your organization’s designated voting contact will receive an email with a link to the formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. An additional email will be sent with a username and password along with a link to our online voting platform. It is important to make sure your voting contact is up-to-date.</p>
<h2 id="want-to-add-your-voice">Want to add your voice?</h2>
<p>We are accepting independent nominations until 7 November 2017. Organizations interested in standing as an independent candidate should contact me by this date with the endorsements of ten other Crossref members.</p>
<p>The election itself will be held at <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-annual">LIVE17 Singapore</a>, our annual meeting, on 14 November 2017. We hope you’ll be there to hear the results.</p>
You do want to see how it's made — seeing what goes into altmetricshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/you-do-want-to-see-how-its-made-seeing-what-goes-into-altmetrics/
Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000Joe Wasshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/you-do-want-to-see-how-its-made-seeing-what-goes-into-altmetrics/
<p>There&rsquo;s a saying about oil, something along the lines of &ldquo;you really don&rsquo;t want to see how it&rsquo;s made&rdquo;. And whilst I&rsquo;m reluctant to draw too many parallels between the petrochemical industry and scholarly publishing, there are some interesting comparisons to be drawn.</p>
<p>Oil starts its life deep underground as an amorphous sticky substance. Prospectors must identify oil fields, drill, extract the oil and refine it. It finds its way into things as diverse as aspirin, paint and hammocks. And as I lie in my hammock watching paint dry, I&rsquo;m curious to know how crude oil made its way into the aspirin that I’ve taken for the headache brought on by the paint fumes. Whilst it would be better if I did know how these things were made, not knowing doesn&rsquo;t impair the efficacy of my aspirin.</p>
<p>Altmetrics start life deep inside a number of systems. Data buried in countless blogs, social media and web platforms must be identified, extracted and refined before it can be used in products like impact assessments, prompts to engagement, and even tenure decisions. But there the similarity ends. Like the benzene in my aspirin, the data that goes into my favourite metric has come a long way from its origins. But that doesn&rsquo;t mean that I shouldn&rsquo;t know how it was made. In fact, knowing what went into it can help me reason about it, explain it and even improve it.</p>
<h3 id="heavy-industry-or-backyard-refinery">Heavy industry or backyard refinery?</h3>
<p>When you head out to fill your car, you buy fuel from a company that probably did the whole job itself. It found the crude oil, extracted it, refined it, transported it and pumped it into your car. Of course there are exceptions, but a lot of fuel is made by vertically integrated companies who do the whole job. And whilst there are research scientists who brew up special batches for one-off pieces of research, if you wanted to make a batch of fuel for yourself you&rsquo;d have to set up your own back-yard fractional distillation column.</p>
<p>Because the collection of a huge amount of data must be boiled down into altmetrics, organisations who want to produce these metrics have a big job to do. They must find data sources, retrieve the data, process it and produce the end product. The foundation of altmetrics is the measurement of impact, and whilst the intermediary data is very interesting, the ultimate goal of a metric is the end product. If you wanted to make a new metric you&rsquo;d have two choices: set up an oil refinery (i.e. build a whole new system, complete with processing pipeline) or a back-yard still (a one-off research item). Either option involves going out and querying different systems, processing the data and producing an output.</p>
<p>Being able to demonstrate the provenance of a given measurement is important because no measurement is perfect. It&rsquo;s impossible to query every single extant source out there. And even if you could, it would be impossible to prove that you had. And even then, the process of refinement isn&rsquo;t always faultless. Every measurement out there has a story behind it, and being able to tell that story is important when using the measurement for something important. Data sources and algorithms change over time, and comparing a year-old measurement to one made today might be difficult without knowing what underlying observations went into it. A solution to this is complete transparency about the source data, how it was processed, and how it relates to the output.</p>
<h3 id="underlying-data">Underlying data</h3>
<p>This is where Crossref comes in. It turns out that the underlying data that goes into altmetrics is just our kind of thing. As the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly literature, it&rsquo;s our job to work with publishers to keep track of everything that&rsquo;s published, assign DOIs and be the central collection and storage point for metadata and links. Examples of links stored in Crossref are between articles and funders, clinical trial numbers, preprints, datasets etc. With the Event Data project, we are now collecting links between places on the web and our registered content when they&rsquo;re made via DOIs or article landing pages.</p>
<p>This data has wider use than just than altmetrics. For example, an author might want to know over what time period a link to their article was included in Wikipedia, and which edit to the article was responsible for removing it and why. Or, in these days of &ldquo;fake news&rdquo;, someone may want to know everywhere on Twitter that a particular study is referenced so they can engage in conversation.</p>
<p>Whilst the field of altmetrics was the starting point for this project, our goal isn’t to provide any kind of metric. Instead, we provide a stream of Events that occurred concerning a given piece of registered content with a DOI. If you want to build a metric out of it, you&rsquo;re welcome to. There are a million different things you could build out of the data, and each will have a different methodology. By providing this underlying data set, we hope we&rsquo;ve found the right level of abstraction to enable people to build a wide range of things.</p>
<p>Every different end-product will use different data and use different algorithms. By providing an open dataset at the right level of granularity, we allow the producers of these end-products to say exactly which input data they were working with. By making the data open, we allow anyone else to duplicate the data if they wish.</p>
<h3 id="sticky-mess">Sticky mess</h3>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/2017/refinery.png" style="float: right"></p>
<p>To finish, let me return to the sticky mess of the distillation column. We identify sources (websites, APIs and RSS feeds). We visit each one, and collect data. We process that data into Events. And we provide Events via an API. At each stage of processing, we make the data open:</p>
<ul>
<li>The Artifact Registry lists all of the sources, RSS feeds and domains we query.</li>
<li>The Evidence Registry lists which sites we visited, what input we got, what version of each Artifact was used, and which Events were produced.</li>
<li>The Evidence Log describes exactly what every part of the system did, including if it ran into problems along the way.</li>
<li>The Events link back to the Evidence so you can trace exactly what activity led up to the Event.</li>
<li>All the code is open source and the version is linked in the Evidence Record, so you can see precisely which algorithms were used to generate a given Event.</li>
<li>Anyone using the Data can link back to Events, which in turn link back to their Evidence.</li>
</ul>
<p>The end-product, Events, can be used to answer altmetrics-y questions like &ldquo;who tweeted my article?&rdquo;. But the layers below that can be put to a range of other uses. For example:</p>
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;Why does publisher X have a lower Twitter count?&rdquo;. The Evidence Logs might show that they tend to block bots from their site, preventing data from being collected.</li>
<li>&ldquo;Why did their Twitter count rise?&rdquo;. The Evidence Logs might show that they stopped blocking bots.</li>
<li>&ldquo;What does Crossref think the DOI is for landing page X?&rdquo;. A search of the Evidence Logs might show that the Event Data system visited the page on a given date and decided that it corresponded to DOI Y.</li>
<li>&ldquo;Which domains hold DOI landing pages?&rdquo;. The &ldquo;Domains&rdquo; Artifact will show the domains that Event Data looked at, and the Evidence Logs will show which versions were used over time.</li>
</ul>
<p>By producing not only Events, but being completely transparent about the refinement process, we hope that people can build things beyond traditional altmetrics, and also make use of the intermediary products as well. And by using open licenses, we allow reuse of the data.</p>
<h3 id="see-you-in-toronto">See you in Toronto!</h3>
<p>There&rsquo;s so much more to say but I&rsquo;ve run out of ink. To find out more, come to <a href="http://altmetricsconference.com/">4:AM Altmetrics Conference</a>! I&rsquo;ll be speaking at the conference in Session 10 on the 28th. I&rsquo;ll also be at the <a href="http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics17/">Altmetrics Workshop on the 26th</a>. Stacy Konkiel and I are hosting the Hackathon on the 29th, where you can get your hands on the data. See you there!</p>
<p>This blog post was originally posted on the <a href="http://altmetricsconference.com/category/blog/">4:AM Altmetrics Conference Blog</a>.</p>
Using the Crossref REST API. Part 4 (with CLA)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-4-with-cla/
Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Rachael Lammeyrlammeyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-4-with-cla/<p>As a follow-up to our <a href="https://crossref.org/categories/api-case-study/">blog posts</a> on the Crossref REST API we talked to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using the Crossref REST API as part of their workflow.</p>
<p><span ><b>Alex Cole, Senior Business Analyst at the Copyright Licensing Agency introduces the DCS</b></span></p>
<p>The Digital Content Store (DCS) is an innovative rights, technology and content platform for UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), which was developed collaboratively with HEIs, publishers and technology partners. The platform is included in the CLA annual licence fee and is an optional tool for licensees.</p>
<p>At its core, the system is a searchable repository of digital copies that have been created under the licence by HEIs (the CLA Digital Content Store), it also functions as a workflow management tool. When extracts are digitised by HEIs under the CLA Licence, they are uploaded directly to the DCS. Once an extract is uploaded and assigned to a course, students are able to access the extract via a secure link. Every year HEIs are obliged to report all of these digitised items to CLA as part of the terms of their copyright blanket licence. Prior to the DCS, HEIs were having to submit this data manually, a process that could take days, if not weeks. The system removes the need for annual census reporting to CLA, reducing the data collection burden on the HE sector and creating administrative efficiencies through streamlining the digital course pack creation process.<br></p>
<p><span ><b>Can you talk about how you&rsquo;re using the <a href="https://www.cla.co.uk/blog-crossref-api#_msocom_1">Crossref REST API</a> within CLA Digital Content Store (DCS)?</b></span></p>
<p>When a DCS user adds a new extract to a course they need to include relevant metadata. This metadata is necessary, as it ultimately helps CLA in correctly identifying the copyright owner of the extract so that we can make sure they receive fair payment in our royalties distributions.
The Crossref REST API supplies the DCS user with article and journal metadata so that they can provide the correct information about the content they are uploading. Using the API saves the user the time they would have otherwise spent searching for this data, streamlining their workflow and making the process more efficient.</p>
<p>Searching for and adding content in the DCS
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/CLA_blog.jpg" alt="Screen shot" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><span ><b>What are your future development plans?</b></span></p>
<p>We’re continuing to develop the DCS in order to improve user experience for our customers. We’re currently looking into opening up access for our users by allowing academics to submit requests to
the DCS via a web-form and our own DCS Course Content URL API. We are also looking into incorporating the Crossref REST API into some of our back office workflows to improve efficiency and simplify our workflow. The metadata that we can retrieve from Crossref can help us match customer usage to our rights database.</p>
<p><span ><b>What else would you like to see in <a href="https://www.cla.co.uk/blog-crossref-api#_msocom_1">Crossref metadata</a>?</b></span></p>
<p>Going forward we’d like to see:<br>
* More books included in the database.<br>
* Indicating if an ISSN is associated with the print or digital edition of a journal.<br><br>
Thanks Alex!</p>Event Data enters Betahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-enters-beta/
Wed, 05 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Kemphttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/event-data-enters-beta/<p>We’ve been talking about it at events, blogging about it on our site, living it, breathing it, and even sometimes dreaming about it, and now we are delighted to announce that Crossref Event Data has entered Beta.</p>
<p><img src="http://0-assets.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/logo/crossref-event-data-logo-200.svg" alt="Crossref Event Data logo" width="200" height="83" /></p>
<p>A collaborative initiative by Crossref and DataCite, Event Data offers transparency around the way interactions with scholarly research occur online, allowing you to discover where it’s bookmarked, linked, liked, shared, referenced, commented on etc., across the web, and beyond publisher platforms.</p>
<p>The name Event Data reflects the nature of the service, as it collects and stores digital actions that occur on the web, from the quick and simple, such as bookmarking and referencing, through to deeper interconnectivity such as exposing the links between research artifacts. Each individual action is timestamped and recorded in our system as an Event, and made available to the community via an API.</p>
<p>Event Data will be available for absolutely anyone to use; publishers, third party vendors, editors, bibliometricans, researchers, authors, funders etc., and with tens of thousands of events occurring every day, there’s a wealth of insight to be gained for those interested in analyzing and interpreting the data.</p>
<p>It’s important to note that Event Data does not provide metrics. What is does provide is the raw data to help you facilitate your own analysis, giving you the freedom to integrate the data into your own systems.</p>
<p>We are currently working very closely with a few organizations with specific use cases who are helping us to test and refine Beta before we launch our production service later this year. If you decide to take a look at Beta yourself, all the data you collect from Event Data is licensed for public sharing and reuse <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/terms/">according to our Terms of Use.</a></p>
<p><em>Until Event Data is in production mode, we do not recommend building any commercial or customer-based tools off the data.</em>
If you are not in the Beta test group but are interested in participating, please contact me below. For more information about Event Data, <a href="https://0-www-eventdata-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/guide/index.html">please see our user guide.</a></p>
<p>Please contact me, <a href="mailto:eventdata@crossref.org">Jennifer Kemp</a>&mdash;Outreach Manager for Event Data&mdash;with any questions.</p>Crossref and colleagues in South Koreahttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-and-colleagues-in-south-korea/
Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ginny Hendricksginnyhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-and-colleagues-in-south-korea/<h3 id="connecting-crossref-orcid-datacite-and-our-communities">Connecting Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, and our communities</h3>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> What do you get if you combine our three organisations for a week to catch up with our Korean community - publishers, librarians, universities, researchers, and service providers?
<strong>A:</strong> Two events, plenty of meetings, great conversations and feedback, fabulous Korean hospitality, and a little jet-lag.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/tweet-south-korea-blog.jpg" alt="tweet image" width="350px" />
</div>
<p>Over the past few years, Crossref has seen huge growth in our members in Korea. We have nine <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/community/sponsors">Sponsoring Affiliates</a> (who look after nearly 1,000 members between them), two Sponsoring Members and nearly 80 Library members. With the <a href="http://0-www.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu">International DOI Foundation (IDF)</a> strategy meeting taking place in Daejon, it seemed sensible to combine that with our own events and meetings with key organizations. This also fitted nicely with some plans that ORCID and DataCite had, so we combined forces.</p>
<p>We (that&rsquo;s me, Rachael Lammey, Ed Pentz, and Geoffrey Bilder) hosted a <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/crossref-live-locals/">Crossref LIVE local</a> event on Monday 12th June for around 80 members and affiliates. We were joined by Alice Meadows and Nobuko Maiyairi (ORCID), Martin Fenner (DataCite), and Professor Sun-Tae Hong (Seoul National University) as co-presenters. We looked at the global reach of Korean research, and how registering content with Crossref and participating in services like Reference Linking helps create valuable connections between research outputs. With so many established members in Korea, we were able to go beyond the basics and emphasize the importance of metadata input, metadata delivery, and preview our upcoming <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data/">Event Data</a> service. We also talked data-sharing and the value of integrating ORCID iDs into publisher and institution workflows.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/growth-research-outputs-asia-pacific.png" alt="Growth chart" class="img-responsive"/>
<em>Growth in research outputs in Asia Pacific 2009-2017. Source: Web of Science databases SCI-E, SSCI and AHCI only, downloaded 19/4/2017. Data provided by Wiley (thank you!)</em></p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/jgic-seoul.jpg" alt="JGIC image" width="350px" />
</div>
<p>Later in the week we took a multi-pronged approach to highlight the many shared principles of our organizations and discuss the specific initiatives we’re collaborating on. We held the <a href="https://orcid.org/content/joint-global-infrastructure-conference">Joint Global Infrastructure Conference</a> covering the global nature of what we do and the connections/interoperability between ORCID, DataCite and Crossref. This interoperability and our governance structures lend themselves to cooperation on other initiatives such as <a href="https://twitter.com/metadata2020?lang=en">Metadata 2020</a> and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-oi-project-gets-underway-planning-an-open-organization-identifier-registry/">The OI Project</a>, which we were able to share.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/jgic_seoul" data-widget-id="879259929458225152">Check out all #jgic_seoul tweets.</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Guest speakers volunteered to talk about how they work with our organizations - we were joined by Choon Shil Lee from the <a href="https://kamje.or.kr/intro.php?body=eng_index">Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE)</a> to demonstrate their ORCID integrations, and Hideaki Takeda from the <a href="https://0-japanlinkcenter-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/top/english.html">Japan Link Centre (JaLC)</a> who discussed the infrastructure and services they use to register and disseminate content globally. User stories like this are great - they highlight how people work with our services, give others ideas, and also flag up where we can do more.</p>
<p>Part of doing more involved providing clarification on Crossref’s position alongside other DOI Registration Agencies. With a new Registration Agency in Korea, we needed to communicate the global nature of what we do to help our members achieve their discoverability goals, as <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/membership/benefits">not all DOIs are made equal</a>. Through working with ORCID and DataCite colleagues we were able to place great importance both on our work worldwide, and on the benefits to Korean societies in collaborating outside national boundaries.</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/plug-image.jpg" alt="Plug socket image" width="300px" />
</div>
<p>Combining talks from our three organizations was a great opportunity to emphasize the importance of shared global infrastructure. Geoffrey Bilder’s plug socket analogy is apt - services that work cross-border, cross-language, and cross-subject areas streamline processes for all of our different communities and enable research to travel beyond national boundaries and help it be found, linked, cited and assessed.</p>
<p>Want to find out more? Slides from both meetings are available <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/Crossref/tag/live-seoul-2017">here</a> and <a href="https://orcid.org/content/joint-global-infrastructure-conference">here</a>, and watch out for further collaborative events.</p>Crossref receives SOC accreditation for data integrity and securityhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-receives-soc-accreditation-for-data-integrity-and-security/
Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/crossref-receives-soc-accreditation-for-data-integrity-and-security/<p>We are delighted to announce that Crossref has been awarded the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2® accreditation after an independent assessment of our controls and procedures by the American Institute of CPA’s (AICPA).</p>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/soc-logo-2.jpg" alt="SOC logo" width="200px" />
</div>
<p>The SOC 2® accreditation is awarded to service organizations that have passed standard trust services criteria relating to the security, availability, and processing integrity of systems used to process users’ data and the confidentiality and privacy of the information processed by these systems.</p>
<p>The AICPA’s assessment also reviewed our vendor management programs, internal corporate governance and risk management processes, and regulatory oversight.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ssae-16.com/soc-2/">Find out more about the SOC accreditation structure</a></p>Now put your hands up! (for a Similarity Check update)https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/now-put-your-hands-up-for-a-similarity-check-update/
Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000Madeleine Watsonhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/now-put-your-hands-up-for-a-similarity-check-update/
<p>Today, I’m thinking back to 2008. A time when khaki and gladiator sandals dominated my wardrobe. The year when Obama was elected, and Madonna and Guy Ritchie parted ways. When we were given both the iPhone 3G and the Kindle, and when the effects of the global financial crisis lead us to come to terms with the notion of a ‘staycation’. In 2008 we met both Wall-E and Benjamin Button, were enthralled by the Beijing Olympics, and became addicted to Breaking Bad. And lest we forget, 2008 was also the year in which Beyoncé brought us Single Ladies; in all its sassy hand-waving, monochrome glory. For Crossref though, 2008 holds another important milestone as it was the year we launched our Similarity Check initiative. Today, the artist formerly known as CrossCheck provides our members with cost-effective access to Turnitin’s powerful text comparison tool, <a href="http://www.ithenticate.com/" target="_blank">iThenticate</a>.</p>
<p>Fast forward nearly a decade, and it’s wonderful to see just how Similarity Check membership has grown in the nine years since launch; from 16 original members in 2008 to over 1,300 today.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Sim Check member graph_Fig 1.1.png" alt="Membership graph" width="800px" height="450" class="img-responsive" /></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.1 The number of publishers participating in the Similarity Check service each year between 2008 – 2017 (to April)</em></p>
<p><br>
Usage of iThenticate is also consistent with this growth in membership, and throughout 2016 our members checked over four million manuscripts for similarity using the tool. As Similarity Check members contribute their full-text content into Turnitin’s database, this increase in membership also has a dramatic impact on the volume of content indexed by Turnitin. Today, members can compare their manuscripts against Turnitin’s database of over 60 million full-text works provided by Similarity Check members. With over 88 million works currently registered with Crossref, this means that 68% of all content deposited with us is now available for comparison in iThenticate.</p>
<p>Over the years we have worked very closely with Turnitin to help champion new iThenticate feature developments that best support our member’s use of the tool as a core function of their editorial workflow. Many of our members too have also worked together with Turnitin to provide feedback on user experience and design.</p>
<p>Below, Turnitin’s Product Manager for iThenticate, Sun Oh, shares an insight into their research process and how Similarity Check member’s feedback has been critical in developing new and improved functionality in iThenticate.</p>
<p><strong>Read on to learn more from Sun&hellip;</strong></p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/turnitin-logo-primary-rgb.png" alt="Turnitin logo" width="400px" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Sun Oh is a Senior Product Manager at Turnitin. She is currently the Product Manager for iThenticate and backend systems including the Content Intake System and similarity reports.</em></p>
<p><br>
Last year we surveyed our Crossref customers to find out what Similarity Check improvements they would like to see and noticed a recurring request for the ability to compare two or more personally sourced documents.</p>
<p>We were intrigued and decided to run with it. We contacted the respondents who had asked for this, and started conversations to find out more. This helped us gather invaluable data, which in turn helped us to build the feature based on real use cases and with a clear view of what was wanted.</p>
<p>The design prototypes were reviewed for usability and effectiveness each step of the way by the respondents and once we had the feature up and running, those who requested it in our initial survey were among the first to trial it.</p>
<p>We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve now launched the new Doc-to-Doc comparison feature, available through iThenticate’s native interface. Simply select the Doc-to-Doc comparison upload method from the document submission panel.</p>
<p>If you are a Crossref member using Similarity Check, you have exclusive early access to this new feature, which allows you to use iThenticate’s powerful similarity check functionality and apply it to your own, private documents.</p>
<h2 id="how-does-doc-to-doc-comparison-work">How does Doc-to-Doc Comparison work?</h2>
<p>Doc-to-Doc comparison allows users to upload one primary document and compare it against up to five other documents.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/SimCheck_Doc-to-doc_ Fig 1.2.png" alt="Doc-to-Doc Comparison screenshot" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.2 The document upload screen for Doc-to-Doc comparison</em></p>
<p><br>
When the upload is complete, a similarity score is generated for the primary document based on the amount of similar content found in the comparison documents. A full comparison report is also available.</p>
<p>The comparison report will open in the document viewer, and will display the primary document along with a list of the comparison documents and with their similarity percentage. If one of the comparison documents doesn’t include text that matches the primary document, iThenticate will still display it anyway, with a 0% score, allowing users to rule it out of their inspection. The similarity report will be stored securely in the user’s folder until they delete it.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/SimCheck_Doc-to-doc_Fig 1.3.png" alt="Document viewer screenshot" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Figure 1.3 Similarity report for Doc-to-Doc comparison</em></p>
<p><br>
As these documents will not be stored in a shared database, they won’t affect the similarity score of any future submissions. Primary and comparison documents remain completely private and will not be indexed into the shared iThenticate content database.</p>
<p>To get a better idea of how Doc-to-Doc comparison works, check out the <a href="https://guides.turnitin.com/iThenticate/Doc-to-Doc_Comparison" target="_blank">iThenticate feature guide </a>on the Turnitin website.</p>
<h2 id="start-using-doc-to-doc-comparison-now">Start using Doc-to-Doc Comparison now!</h2>
<p>If you’re a Crossref member using Similarity Check, you can log in to your iThenticate account now and select the Doc-to-Doc comparison link on the homepage.</p>
<h2 id="what-else-is-new-in-ithenticate-in-this-new-release">What else is new in iThenticate in this new release?</h2>
<h3 id="new-look">New Look</h3>
<p>In addition to Doc-to-Doc comparison, we decided to refresh the look and feel of iThenticate; the same tools our users know and trust, now with a modern interface. Users will also notice that iThenticate now has more readable font and friendlier styling throughout.</p>
<h3 id="report-mode-memory">Report Mode Memory</h3>
<p>To make life easier, iThenticate now remembers whether users were in the All Sources or Match Overview mode when they last used the Document Viewer. iThenticate will then open documents in this mode automatically hereafter.</p>
<h3 id="improved-submission-process">Improved Submission Process</h3>
<p>We’re also enhancing our submission process by making the upload requirements more inclusive. We’ve increased the possible file size limit from 40MB to 100MB when uploading to either the database or to Doc-to-Doc comparison, and PowerPoint (.ppt) and Excel (.xlsm) file formats are now accepted.</p>
<h2 id="developments-completed-in-2016">Developments completed in 2016</h2>
<p>If Similarity Check members haven’t had a chance to check out the improvements we introduced in iThenticate throughout 2016, here’s a quick recap. You can always find our updates on the What&rsquo;s New page of the iThenticate website.</p>
<h3 id="download-user-list">Download User List</h3>
<p>The ability for administrators to download a list of all the users in their account has been added. This list will allow administrators to easily send emails to users.</p>
<h3 id="similarity-score-calculation-update">Similarity Score Calculation Update</h3>
<p>We updated how the similarity score is calculated when bibliographic material is excluded from a similarity report. Now, when bibliography exclusion is enabled, the word count of the bibliography is not included when calculating the overall percentage. This update to the similarity report calculation helps to provide users with a more accurate similarity score.</p>
<h3 id="improved-security">Improved Security</h3>
<p>We are fully committed to keeping user’s data safe and secure at all times. To that end, we’ve added additional security logging, put in measures to enforce stronger passwords, and enabled Captcha after failed login attempts.</p>
<h3 id="faster-report-generation">Faster Report Generation</h3>
<p>We’ve increased the number of resources dedicated to the generation of similarity reports for our iThenticate service. As a result, users should see faster turnaround times for similarity reports.</p>
<h3 id="support-for-eight-additional-languages">Support for Eight Additional Languages</h3>
<p>The iThenticate user interface is now available in eight additional languages: German, Dutch, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, French, and both Simplified &amp; Traditional Chinese. When adding new users to an account, administrators can specify the language of the new user, which will then send a welcome email in the selected language. Individual users can also set their preferred language by selecting a language from the Language dropdown in the Settings menu.</p>
<h3 id="content-intake-system">Content Intake System</h3>
<p>We’ve developed a new Content Intake System which enables our publication content database to scale so that our users can compare against a constantly growing database of the most recently published content. This allows us to index Similarity Check members’ data in a much more reliable and efficient way than legacy intake methods. And recently, we’ve made the collecting and processing of content from Crossref members using Similarity Check even faster by parallelising our processors. This means that we have more processors running simultaneously to process data.</p>
<p>By removing the need for crawling, we will also minimize our impact on traffic to a Similarity Check member’s public-facing website. The Content Intake System is able to directly collect full text URLs from members DOI metadata. This results in a huge reduction in the time it takes from when a publisher first deposits a new DOI with Crossref, to when the content is indexed by us into our full-text publication database. To date, we’ve been able to index the content associated with 60 million Crossref DOIs, and have indexed more than 165 million published works in total which submissions are compared against in iThenticate.</p>
<h3 id="walker-web-crawler">Walker (web crawler)</h3>
<p>We’ve developed a new web crawler. Referred to as “Walker”, the crawler makes it possible to provide quicker and more reliable similarity matches to content available on the web. Not to be confused with the Content Intake System mentioned above, Walker’s purpose is to crawl the public web and is not used for indexing full-text content from Similarity Check members.</p>
<p>Using Walker, we’re adding an average of nearly 10 million new web pages to our content database per day, ensuring we have the freshest internet content available to find matches against.</p>
<h2 id="we-d-love-to-get-your-feedback">We’d love to get your feedback!</h2>
<p>As we design and develop new features, we want to make sure we’re fully understanding Similarity Check member’s needs and would love the opportunity to engage with users for further research. If you’d like to sign up to participate in user research for upcoming feature developments, please take a few minutes to fill out our Feedback Program Form. We look forward to connecting with you!</p>
<h2 id="contact-turnitin">Contact Turnitin</h2>
<p>For iThenticate technical and billing support, please email ccsupport@ithenticate.com</p>
<p>For questions about content indexing, please contact Gareth at gmalcolm@turnitin.com</p>
<p>For iThenticate product development questions, please contact Sun at soh@turnitin.com</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>- Sun Oh, Product Manager for iThenticate</em></p>
<p><br>
<strong>Thanks to Sun and the whole team at Turnitin for sharing this update.</strong></p>
<p>For more information about Similarity Check, visit our <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/similarity-check/">service page</a>.</p>
<p>Want to join Crossref Similarity Check? Please contact our <a href="mailto:member@crossref.org">membership team</a>.</p>
Data citations and the eLife story so farhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citations-and-the-elife-story-so-far/
Thu, 18 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000Melissa Harrisonhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/data-citations-and-the-elife-story-so-far/<p>When we set up the eLife journal in 2012, we knew datasets were an important component of research content and decided to give them prominence in a section entitled ‘Major datasets’ (see images below). Within this section, major previously published and generated datasets are listed. We also strongly encourage data citations in the reference list.</p>
<p><img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/elife-blog.png" alt="Major datasets" class="img-responsive"/></p>
<p><em>Major Datasets for <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7554/eLife.24487">“Structural basis of protein translocation by the Vps4-Vta1 AAA ATPase”</a> by N. Monroe, H. Han, P. Shen, et. al.</em></p>
<p>Almost five years on and I feel we have still not cracked it! We have signed up to the <a href="https://www.force11.org/group/joint-declaration-data-citation-principles-final">Force11 data citation principles</a>, which were published three years back; we have been actively involved in working groups of Force11 and others, for example the <a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/19/100784">Data Citation Roadmap for Scientific Publishers</a> and the JATS XML <a href="http://jats4r.org/data-citations">data citation recommendation</a> of <a href="http://jats4r.org">JATS4R</a>. I am also currently working with other publishers to come up with recommended JATS XML tagging for data availability statements, which is easier said than done considering the nuances of dataset uses and also how different publishers approach this.</p>
<p>Added to this, there is still significant push-back from authors about putting all dataset citations in the reference list (for example, authors are concerned about self-citing by citing a dataset created as part of the research article; “dataset citations” that are in effect a link to a search results page on a database; and the necessitation of hundreds of reference entries if an author has used a large base for the research).</p>
<p>While eLife is very active in this space, and aims to arrange and mark up the datasets and citations produced by our authors in line with recommendations, the recommendations still have some gaps and the complete picture is not yet clear.</p>
<p>In late 2014, we brought in-house the process of depositing Crossref metadata (previously our online host did this for us). It gave us control of our processes and, at the time, we sent all the information we could to Crossref and have ensured our references are open and available in the Crossref public API. The code for this conversion process is all open-source and available for reuse. It can be found on GitHub (<a href="https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-crossref-feed">https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-crossref-feed</a>). Since then, besides small improvements to the code and troubleshooting problems, we’ve not updated the code. I have been keeping a list of Crossref features and new deposit metadata we can add to our deposits, and now is the time for us to start working on this again.</p>
<p>One of the items we’ll be addressing is data citations.</p>
<p>The Crossref reference schema does not cater well for non-book or -journal content, and if an item does not have a DOI, the “reference” is not very useful because of the few tags available in the Crossref schema.</p>
<p>However, Crossref have introduced the relationship type to their schema, so data references can be well linked and mineable. As I see Crossref as a potential broker between publishers and data repositories in the future, using the relationship-type deposit for all datasets will assist this and also allow these data points to more easily be seen within the article Nexus framework (see the recent blog post, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citations/">How do you deposit data citations?</a>).</p>
<p>At eLife, we already distinguish between Dataset generated as part of research results (relationship type in the Crossref schema: “isSupplementedBy”) and Dataset produced by a different set of researchers or previously published (relationship type: “references”). Therefore, it will not be hard for us to convert all the information about data referencing that is within the dataset section into a relationship-type deposit in the conversion to Crossref XML.</p>
<p>We have also recently gone through an exercise of defining a set of rules for all our references and, of the 12 allowed types, one is data. The rules for Schematron (a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees; see also this useful <a href="http://jats4r.org/schematron-a-handy-xml-tool-thats-not-just-for-villains">article about Schematron</a> on the JATS4R learning centre) have been written for the eLife ‘business’ rules. Subject to final testing, these will be integrated into our workflow (the Schematron is open source and available for reuse on <a href="https://github.com/elifesciences/reference-schematron">GitHub</a>, and we will also build an API for people to use the Schematron direct). This will allow us to easily identify all data references and convert them into relationship types in the XML delivered to Crossref. This way, they will not be lost in the references section of our deposits, but properly identified.</p>
<p>However, we do appreciate this will become harder for us as authors become more familiar with datasets as references, because we will not be able to identify the difference between generated and analysed datasets so easily.</p>
<p>The code developed and used to complete these conversions will, again, be on Github and open source, and we actively encourage the reuse of this.</p>
<p>While the industry is still working on the best way to deal with data and ensuring it is given the prominence it requires, we feel this is the best approach we can take. Nothing is forever and we can still change what we do in the future. The beauty of open-source code also means that if there is an alternative approach now or in the future, the code we wrote at eLife can be developed by someone else in the future and we can all benefit.</p>
<p>If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">contact us</a>.</p>Want to be on our Board?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/want-to-be-on-our-board/
Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000Lisa Hart Martinhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/want-to-be-on-our-board/<blockquote>
<p>Do you want to affect change for the scholarly community?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2017 election.</p>
<p>Key responsibilities of the Board are setting the strategic direction for the organization, providing financial oversight, and approving new policies and services. Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Establishing <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-oi-project-gets-underway-planning-an-open-organization-identifier-registry">The OI Project</a> to create a persistent Organization Identifier;</li>
<li>Inclusion of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/news/2016-11-02-crossref-now-accepts-preprints">preprints in the Crossref metadata</a>; and</li>
<li>The approval to <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/event-data">develop Event Data</a> which will track online activity from multiple sources.<!--more--></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="any-member-can-express-interest-in-serving-on-the-board">Any member can express interest in serving on the Board</h2>
<p>We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you. Crossref members that are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, can <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwqraD2fjb3eqZgLpTQWsMYPQvvz4LARLq6k8H8mA7xGbZAw/viewform">express their interest</a> together with statements of interest from you and from your organization. The form should be completed and sent to us before 01 June 2017.</p>
<h2 id="the-role-of-the-nominating-committee">The role of the Nominating Committee</h2>
<p>The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members.</p>
<p>Current Nominating Committee members:</p>
<ul>
<li>John Shaw, Sage (Chair)</li>
<li>Mark Patterson, eLife</li>
<li>Paul Peters, Hindawi</li>
<li>Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press</li>
<li>Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="about-the-election-and-our-board">About the election and our Board</h2>
<p>We have a principle of <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/truths">one member, one vote</a>; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are six seats up for election in 2017. The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. View a list of the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/board-and-governance">current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions)</a>. The election opens online in late September 2017 and voting is done by proxy online or in person at the annual business meeting during Crossref LIVE in November 2017. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in late September 2017. The board needs to be truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organizations who publish.</p>
<p>Please <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwqraD2fjb3eqZgLpTQWsMYPQvvz4LARLq6k8H8mA7xGbZAw/viewform">express interest using the form</a>, or <a href="mailto:lhart@crossref.org">email me</a> with any questions.</p>The OI Project gets underway planning an open organization identifier registryhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-oi-project-gets-underway-planning-an-open-organization-identifier-registry/
Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-oi-project-gets-underway-planning-an-open-organization-identifier-registry/<p>At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-organization-identifier-project-a-way-forward/">reported on</a> collaboration in the area of organization identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.</p>
<p>We had a great response and are happy to report that the Working Group has now been established, and is already underway with work to develop a plan for an open, independent, not-for-profit, sustainable, organization identifier registry. <!--more--></p>
<p>There is <a href="https://orcid.org/content/organization-identifier-working-group">information about the OI Project Working Group on the ORCID website</a> including a list of the <a href="https://orcid.org/content/organization-id-working-group">17 working group members</a>. They represent a broad range of scholarly communications stakeholders. Our scope of work includes three separate but interdependent areas:</p>
<ul>
<li>Governance;</li>
<li>Registry Product Definition; and</li>
<li>Business Model &amp; Funding.</li>
</ul>
<p>The initial goal of the Working Group is to create a thorough and robust implementation plan by the end of 2017.</p>
<p>Please take a look at the website for more information and we’ll provide updates as things progress throughout the course of the year.</p>
<p><strong>Please <a href="mailto:oi-project@orcid.org">contact us</a> with any questions.</strong></p>Revised Crossref DOI display guidelines are now activehttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/revised-crossref-doi-display-guidelines-are-now-active/
Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000Ed Pentzhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/revised-crossref-doi-display-guidelines-are-now-active/<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/crossref-doi-display-march-2017.jpg
" alt="Crossref DOI Display" width="300px" />
</div>
<p>We have updated our DOI display guidelines as of March 2017, this month! I described the what and the why in my previous blog post <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/new-crossref-doi-display-guidelines-are-on-the-way">New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way</a> and in an email I wrote to all our members in September 2016. I’m pleased to say that the updated Crossref <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines">DOI display guidelines are available via this fantastic new website</a> and are now active. Here is the URL of the full set of guidelines in case you want to bookmark it (<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines/">https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines/</a>) and a shareable image to spread the word on social media.</p>
<p>This blog is a quick reminder that all Crossref members should now be displaying DOIs in the <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/display-guidelines">recommended new format</a> from this month, on any new content you publish online. Please note these guidelines are for Crossref DOIs only, we have nearly 90 million registered but there are others, and <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/become-a-member/benefits">not all DOIs are made equal</a>.</p>
<p>The main changes are to display the DOI as a full, linked URL using HTTPS:</p>
<p><code>https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.xxxx/xxxxx</code></p>
<p>For background on the HTTPS issue please read Geoffrey Bilder’s blog post, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linking-dois-using-https-the-background-to-our-new-guidelines">Linking DOIs using HTTPS</a>.</p>
<h2 id="what-will-happen-if-you-don-t-update-your-crossref-doi-display">What will happen if you don’t update your Crossref DOI display?</h2>
<p>We tell members that they should be working towards making the change even if they can’t do it until later - we recognize that it is not always an easy change to make.</p>
<p>However, if members don’t make the change, nothing immediate will happen (Crossref won’t fine you!) although as more members make the change your display will look odd and out of place compared with other members’ content.</p>
<h3 id="if-you-have-any-questions-please-do-not-hesitate-to-contact-us-mailto-feedback-crossref-org">If you have any questions please do not hesitate to <a href="mailto:feedback@crossref.org">contact us</a>.</h3>How do you deposit data citations?https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citations/
Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000Jennifer Linhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citations/<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/Data_within_XML.png" alt="An exemplary image" width="300px" />
</div>
<h3 id="please-visit-crossref-s-official-data-software-citations-deposit-guide-http-support-crossref-org-hc-en-us-articles-215787303-crossref-data-software-citation-deposit-guide-for-publishers-for-deposit-details">Please visit Crossref&rsquo;s official <a href="http://0-support.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215787303-Crossref-Data-Software-Citation-Deposit-Guide-for-Publishers">Data &amp; Software Citations Deposit Guide</a> for deposit details.</h3>
<p><strong>Very carefully, one at a time? However you wish.</strong></p>
<p>Last year, we introduced linking publication metadata to associated data and software when registering publisher content with Crossref <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linking-publications-to-data-and-software/">Linking Publications to Data and Software</a>. This blog post follows the “whats” and “whys” with the all-important “how(s)” for depositing data and software citations. We have made the process simple and fairly straightforward: publishers deposit data &amp; software links by adding them directly into the standard metadata deposit via <strong>relation type and/or references</strong>. This is part of the <strong>existing content registration</strong> process and requires no new workflows.</p>
<h2 id="relationships">Relationships</h2>
<div style="float:right;margin:10px">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/data_article_nexus_short.png" alt="An exemplary image" width="500px" />
</div>
<p>Data &amp; software citations are a valuable part of the “<a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-article-nexus-linking-publications-to-associated-research-outputs/">research article nexus</a>”, comprised of the publication linked to a variety of associated research objects, including data and software, supporting information, protocols, videos, published peer reviews, a preprint, conference papers, etc. For all of these resources, we use relation types in the metadata deposit to “anchor” the article in the article nexus and link to it.</p>
<h3 id="for-data-software-we-ask-for">For data &amp; software, we ask for:</h3>
<ul>
<li>identifier of the dataset/software</li>
<li>identifier type: “DOI”, “Accession”, “PURL”, “ARK”, “URI”, “Other” *</li>
<li><a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/214357426">relationship type</a>: “isSupplementedBy” or “references”</li>
<li>description of dataset or software.
<br/>
*<em>Additional identifier types beyond those used for data or software are also accepted, including ARXIV, ECLI, Handle, ISSN, ISBN, PMID, PMCID, and UUID.</em></li>
</ul>
<p>Crossref maintains an expansive set of relationship types to support the various resources linked in the research article nexus. For data and software, we recommend “isSupplementedBy” and “references” as relationship types in the metadata. Use the former if it was generated de novo as part of the research results. For those generated by another project and then reused, we recommend applying “references” in the relationship type. These were selected in consultation with DataCite and data working groups. They will provide the level of specificity requested by the community.</p>
<p>To illustrate how to represent the link within the metadata deposit, we offer two examples from two popular dataset identifiers, one for each of the relationship types.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Dataset</th>
<th>Snippet of deposit XML containing link</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><strong>Dataset with DOI:</strong> <br/> Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity. <br/> <strong>Database:</strong> Dryad Digital Repository<br/><strong>DOI:</strong> <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5061/dryad.684v0">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5061/dryad.684v0</a></td>
<td><code>&lt;program xmlns=&quot;http://0-www.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/relations.xsd&quot;&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;related_item&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;description&gt;Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity&lt;/description&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;inter_work_relation relationship-type=&quot;isSupplementedBy&quot; identifier-type=&quot;doi&quot;&gt;10.5061/dryad.684v0&lt;/inter_work_relation&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;/related_item&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;/program&gt;</code></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Dataset with accession number:</strong><br/> NKX2-5 mutations causative for congenital heart disease retain functionality and are directed to hundreds of targets <br/><strong>Database:</strong> Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) <br/> <strong>Accession number:</strong> GSE44902 <br/> <strong>URL:</strong> <a href="https://0-www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.libus.csd.mu.edu/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE44902">https://0-www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.libus.csd.mu.edu/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE44902</a></td>
<td><code>&lt;program xmlns=&quot;http://0-www.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/relations.xsd&quot;&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;related_item&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;description&gt;NKX2-5 mutations causative for congenital heart disease retain and are directed to hundreds of targets&lt;/description&gt;</code><br/> <code>&lt;inter_work_relation relationship-type=&quot;references&quot; identifier-type=&quot;Accession&quot;&gt;GSE44902&lt;/inter_work_relation&gt;</code> <br/> <code>&lt;/related_item&gt;</code> <br/><code>&lt;/program&gt;</code></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br/>
In the examples above, the Dryad dataset was generated as part of the research published in an article. Hence, it contains the “isSupplementedBy” relationship type. The GEO dataset was reused by and referenced in a scholarly article published separate from the project that generated this dataset. Hence, it contains the “references” relationship type.</p>
<p>Both Crossref and DataCite employ this method of linking. Data repositories who register their content with DataCite follow the same process and apply the same metadata tags. This means that we achieve direct data interoperability with links in the reverse direction (data and software repositories to journal articles).</p>
<h2 id="references">References</h2>
<p>Another mechanism for depositing data and software citations is to insert it into the manuscript’s references. Publishers then deposit it as part of the article’s references. To do so, publishers follow the general process for depositing references. (Visit Crossref’s <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215578403-Adding-references-to-your-metadata-record">Support page</a> for step-by-step instructions.)</p>
<p>Publishers can deposit the full data or software citation as a unstructured reference.
<br/>
<code>&lt;citation key=&quot;ref=3&quot;&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;unstructured_citation&gt;Morinha F, Dávila JA, Estela B, Cabral JA, Frías Ó, González JL, Travassos P, Carvalho D, Milá B, Blanco G (2017) Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity. Dryad Digital Repository. http://0-dx.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.5061/dryad.684v0&lt;/unstructured_citation\&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;/citation&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;/citation_list&gt;</code></p>
<p>Or they can employ any number of <a href="https://0-support-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215578403-Adding-references-to-your-metadata-record">reference tags</a> currently accepted by Crossref. Most do not readily suit datasets and software as the suite was originally established to match article and book references. This leaves out substantial metadata needed to identify and describe the dataset, however, if the resource does not have a DOI.
<br/>
<code>&lt;citation key=&quot;ref2&quot;&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;doi&gt;10.5061/dryad.684v0&lt;/doi&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;cYear&gt;2017&lt;/cYear&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;author&gt;Morinha F, Dávila JA, Estela B, Cabral JA, Frías Ó, González JL, Travassos P, Carvalho D, Milá B, Blanco G&lt;/author&gt;</code>
<br/>
<code>&lt;/citation&gt;</code>
<br/>
We are exploring the <a href="http://jats4r.org/data-citations">JATS4R</a> recommendations while we consider expanding the current collection. We welcome additional suggestions from the community.</p>
<h2 id="precise-accessible-links">Precise, accessible links</h2>
<p>Crossref’s infrastructure is setup to facilitate the flow of information about scholarly works across the research network. We maintain a fair degree of flexibility both in the structure and completeness of metadata deposited. The aim, though, is to make the links rich in metadata, accurate in associating literature to corresponding resource, and available to both human and machine consumers as per Principle #5 and #7 in the <a href="https://www.force11.org/group/joint-declaration-data-citation-principles-final">Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles</a>.</p>
<p>As with the other associated resources in the article nexus, we recommend depositing data/software links in the publication metadata via relationships. Publishers are free to do this <em>on top of</em> or <em>independent of</em> references. Relationship metadata offer a high degree of precision. References are a hodgepodge of various resources cited by the publication, including articles, books, media, blogs, reference materials, etc. and data citations are hard to isolate. Furthermore, the unstructured, “spaghetti string” text is difficult for systems to parse and extract specific information.</p>
<p>With relationship metadata, data and software resources are expressly designated. We obtain a more accurate link that specifies identifier type and explicitly identifies data generated as part of the research shared in the paper or as reuse of existing data). The richer metadata contained here enables consumers to conduct powerful queries based on different attributes (identifier type, description, relationship), taking data discovery and mining to the next level.</p>
<p>Furthermore, relationships are important for achieving full accessibility of data and software citations. Access to references is based on publisher permission so not all data citations can be shared (excluding DataCite DOIs). In contrast, all links deposited via relationships are publicly available.</p>
<p>Publishers play an important role in supporting research validation and reproducibility. Data &amp; software citation is a basic part of of this practice, and instrumental in enabling the reuse and verification of these research outputs, tracking their impact, and creating a scholarly structure that recognizes and rewards those involved in producing them. For the full scoop of how to deposit (i.e., technical details and more), we encourage you to reference the Crossref <a href="http://0-support.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/215787303-Crossref-Data-Software-Citation-Deposit-Guide-for-Publishers">Data &amp; Software Citations Deposit Guide</a> and contact us (<a href="mailto:support@crossref.org">support@crossref.org</a>) with questions or feedback.</p>Taking the "con" out of conferenceshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/taking-the-con-out-of-conferences/
Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000Geoffrey Bilderhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/taking-the-con-out-of-conferences/<p>TL;DR</p>
<p>Crossref and DataCite are forming a working group to explore conference identifiers and project identifiers. If you are interested in joining this working group <em>and</em> in doing some actual work for it, please contact us at <code>community@crossref.org</code> and include the text <code>conference identifiers WG</code> in the subject heading. <br></p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/mouse-ears.png" alt= "Mouse ears"/>
</p>
<h2 id="all-the-times-i-could-have-gone-to-walt-disney-world-br-br">All the times I could have gone to Walt Disney World&hellip; <br> <br></h2>
<p>Back around 2010 I added a filter to my email settings that automatically flagged and binned any email that contained the word &ldquo;Orlando.&rdquo; Back then this was a remarkably effective way of detecting and ignoring spam from the numerous fake technology conferences that all seemed to advertise the city of Orlando, Florida as the location for their non-events. I suspected they all chose Orlando as it would provide the <a href="http://0-dictionary.cambridge.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/dictionary/english/punter">punter</a> that little bit of extra motivation to pay and register for the conference as they simultaneously plotted how they could tag-on some holiday time at Walt Disney World. I finally had to remove the filter last year when I realised that the scammers had moved on to advertising more realistically gritty cities in their calls for submissions and that meanwhile I had managed to miss all the mail informing me of the <a href="http://2016.alaannual.org/">ALA&rsquo;s summer 2016 meeting</a> held in, you guessed it&hellip; Orlando. <br> <br></p>
<p>Clearly we need better mechanisms to flag dubious conferences. <br> <br></p>
<p>Late last year Crossref&rsquo;s Strategic initiatives group was approached by “CounterMock,” a group of Crossref members (including major proceedings publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier, IEEE, ACM, IET, etc) who were actively exploring the establishment of an identifier system and registry for scholarly conferences. <br> <br></p>
<p>The long term goal of the group is to make it easier for publishers, researchers and other stakeholders to identify fraudulent and/or low-quality conferences. There has recently been a proliferation of conferences that seem to have been developed specifically to dupe international and early-career researchers into paying substantial conference and publication fees. Sometimes these conferences are intentionally named after long-standing and well-respected conferences. At worst these conferences are entirely fake - no meetings are held and no publications are issued. At best they produce subpar publications of questionable academic integrity. Members of the group are concerned that these &ldquo;mock conferences&rdquo; (Hence &ldquo;COUNTERMOCK&rdquo;) will: <br> <br></p>
<ul>
<li>Waste researcher time.<br> <br></li>
<li>Waste publisher time.<br> <br></li>
<li>Undermine academic trust in conferences and conference proceedings as a trustworthy means of scholarly communication.<br> <br></li>
</ul>
<p>The group understands that the &ldquo;evaluation of a conference quality&rdquo; and the &ldquo;unambiguous identification of conferences&rdquo; are separate concerns (as they are with publications, contributors, etc). But they also realise that it will be hard to address the quality issue without an infrastructure for unambiguously identifying conferences and providing meaningful provenance metadata about those conferences. Moreover, having unique identifiers for conference series would enable a number of other applications. Examples include conference-level metrics, better and more structured info about forthcoming conferences on a certain topic, and more visibility of conferences in research evaluation. <br> <br></p>
<p>Springer Nature has built a <a href="http://0-lod.springer.com.libus.csd.mu.edu/data/search">POC prototype of a conference identifier system</a> and shown it to a number of other parties. The feedback has been that there is interest in the project, but that the consensus is that it should be managed a run by a neutral industry group. They have approached us to form a working group and explore how this project can be advanced. <br> <br></p>
<p>This is all good. Crossref itself doesn&rsquo;t make value judgements on the quality of content registered with us. <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/dois-unambiguously-and-persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly-literature-right/">Crossref DOIs are not quality marks</a>. But we do believe that unambiguous identification of research artifacts is a perquisite to building effective trust and reputation tools.<br> <br></p>
<p>It is possible that the issue of conference identifiers can be folded into <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/the-organization-identifier-project-a-way-forward/">the work we are doing with DataCite and ORCID on organization identifiers</a>. For example, some have argued that organization identifiers should include identifiers for projects or other less formal and more ephemeral corporate entities that are often included in affiliation and/or bibliographic data. It is possible to make the similar arguments in the case of conferences.<br> <br></p>
<p>On the other hand we have also been interested in the issue of &ldquo;project identifiers.&rdquo; <a href="http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405">Martin Fenner</a> and <a href="http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0902-4386">Tom Demeranville</a> have <a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.4216323.v2">made a strong argument</a> that &lsquo;projects&rsquo; can be thought of as containers for collections of project outputs, project members and project funders. Again, it seems plausible that one could make the same case for conferences.<br> <br></p>
<p>At the very least it is important to coordinate any work that is done on conference, project and organization identifiers. This why we have decided to form a joint Crossref/DataCite working group to specifically explore conference and project identifiers and determine how they relate both to each other and to our already ongoing work with ORCID on organization identifiers.
<br> <br>
Additionally, it is likely that the working group will discuss and explore how conference/project identifiers might be used for increasing the transparency of peer review at conferences, better attribution for programme chairs and program committee members, and how they might be incorporated into other services like <a href="https://0-search-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu">Crossref Metadata Search</a>, <a href="https://search.datacite.org/">DataCite search</a>, <a href="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/services/crossmark/">CrossMark</a>, etc.<br> <br></p>
<p>If you are interested in doing some work on this- then please indicate your interest in joining a working group by sending email to <code>community@crossref.org</code> and include the text <code>conference identifiers WG</code> in the subject heading.<br> <br></p>
<p>We will update this blog as the group convenes and makes progress.<br> <br></p>
<p align="center">
<img src="https://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/images/blog/florida.png" alt= "Florida"/>
</p>Linking DOIs using HTTPs: the background to our new guidelineshttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linking-dois-using-https-the-background-to-our-new-guidelines/
Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000Geoffrey Bilderhttps://0-www-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/blog/linking-dois-using-https-the-background-to-our-new-guidelines/<p>Recently we announced that we were making some new recommendations in our DOI display guidelines. One of them was to use the secure HTTPS protocol to link Crossref DOIs, instead of the insecure HTTP.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Some people asked whether the move to HTTPS might affect their ability to measure referrals (i.e. where the people who visit your site come from).</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">TL;DR: Yes</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes. If you do </span><b>not</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> move your DOI links to HTTPS, Crossref, its members and the members of </span><a href="http://0-www.doi.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/registration_agencies.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">other DOI registration agencies</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (e.g. DataCite, JLC, CNKI) will find it increasingly difficult to accurately measure referrals. You should link DOIs using HTTPS.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In fact, if you do not support HTTPS on your site </span><b>now</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">, it is likely that your ability to measure referrals is already impaired. If you do not already have a plan to move your site to HTTPS, you should develop one.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you have already transitioned your site to HTTPS, you should follow the new guidelines and link DOIs via HTTPS as soon as possible. As it stands, you are not sending any referrer information when DOIs are clicked on and followed from your site. You should also make sure that the URLs you have registered with Crossref are HTTPS URLs, otherwise <em>you</em> will not get referrer information on your site when they are followed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Read on if you want some grody details. We&rsquo;ll try to keep it as non-technical as possible.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Two protocols, one web</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">To start with your web browser supports two closely related protocols, HTTP and HTTPS.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first, HTTP, is the protocol that the web started out with. It is an unencrypted protocol and it is also easy to intercept and modify. It is also very easy and inexpensive to implement.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The second protocol, HTTPS, is a secure version of the first protocol. It is very difficult to intercept and modify. It has historically been more complex and expensive to implement. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Here you might say - &ldquo;Great, but HTTPS has been around for a long time. We&rsquo;ve used it for sensitive transactions like authentication and credit card transactions. Why do we want to use DOI links with HTTPS?&rdquo; Why are you suggesting that we should even consider moving our entire site to HTTPS? </span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">The pressure to move to HTTPS</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The insecure HTTP protocol has become a major vector for a lot of security issues on the web. It allows user web pages to be intercepted and modified between the server and the browser. This flaw is being abused for everything from spying, to inserting unwanted advertisements into web pages, to distributing viruses, ransomware and botnets. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As such, there has been a steady drumbeat of industry encouragement to move to the more secure HTTPS protocol for all website functions.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are not going to argue all the points here. Instead we will mention the major constituencies that are advocating for a move to HTTPS and provide you with some pointers. We apologise that these are all so US-centric, but a lot of the web&rsquo;s global direction does seem to be presaged by US adoption trends.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Google</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">It is probably easiest to start with Google, since its practices tend to focus the attention of those managing websites.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Back in 2014 </span><a href="https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Google announced that they would slowly move toward including the use of HTTPS as a ranking signal</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. In 2015 they upped the ante by announcing that </span><a href="https://security.googleblog.com/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">they would start indexing HTTPS versions of pages by default</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. It looks like in early 2017 they will really start to take the gloves off as they </span><a href="https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-as-non-secure"><span style="font-weight: 400;">modify their Chrome browser to flag sites that do not use HTTPS as being <code>insecure</code></span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Every top website, </span><a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=evah"><span style="font-weight: 400;">evah</span></a></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">It looks like Google&rsquo;s plan is working too. Their </span><a href="https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/grid/?hl=en"><span style="font-weight: 400;">2016 transparency report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> shows that most top websites have already transitioned to HTTPS and that this translates to approximately 25% of all web traffic worldwide taking place using HTTPS. Indeed, over 50% of all web pages viewed by desktop users are delivered via HTTPS.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Government agencies</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The USA’s Whitehouse issued [</span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-government"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a directive instructing all Federal websites to adopt HTTPS</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">]. As of December 2016 </span><a href="https://pulse.cio.gov/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">64%</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of federal websites have made the transition.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Libraries</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Much of the pressure to move to HTTPS is coming from the library community who have a historical tradition of protecting patron privacy and resisting efforts to censor content. The third principle of the American Library Association&rsquo;s code of ethics reads:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We protect each library user&rsquo;s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recently there has been </span><a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/librarians-act-now-protect-your-users-its-too-late"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a major push by the Electronic Frontier Foundation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to get libraries to adopt a number of security and privacy practices, including the use of HTTPS by all library systems as well as those used by library vendors.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">What are Crossref members doing about HTTPS?</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How big an issue is this? How many of our members have moved to HTTPS? How many plan to? Well, we looked at the URLs that are registered with Crossref and we tested them with both protocols. Eventually we will write a blog post detailing our findings - but the highlights are:</span>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slightly fewer than half of the member domains tested only support HTTP.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slightly fewer than half of the member domains tested support both HTTP and HTTPS.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">About 370 of the member domains tested only support HTTPS.</span></li>
</ul>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">The transition to HTTPS and the issue of DOI referrals</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The HTTP referrer is a piece of information passed on by a browser that indicates the site from which the user navigated.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So, for example, if a user visiting site <code>A</code> clicks on a link which takes them to site <code>B</code>, site <code>B</code> will then record in its logs that a user visited them from site A. Obviously, this is important information for understanding where your web site traffic comes from. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The default rules for referrals are<sup><a href="#fn1">1</a></sup></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">:</span>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you link between two sites with the same level of security, all referral information is retained.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">When you follow a link from an insecure (HTTP) web site to a secure (HTTPS) site, referral data is passed on to the secure web site. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you follow a link from a secure (HTTPS) web site to an insecure (HTTP) site, referral data is not passed on to the insecure web site.</span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">So let&rsquo;s see what the situation would look like with normal links. If we had two sites, <code>A</code> &amp; <code>B</code>, the following table maps the possible combinations of protocols that can be used to link from <code>A</code> to <code>B</code>. So, for example, row #2 reads:</span>
<blockquote><span style="font-weight: 400;">A user browses site A using HTTP and clicks on a HTTPS link to publisher B who hosts their site using HTTPS. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The last column indicates if the referrer information is passed along by the browser. In the case of row #2, the answer is “yes”. The user has navigated from a less secure site to a more secure site.</span>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>User views site A using</b></td>
<td><b>Site A links to site B using</b></td>
<td><b>Browser reports referrer to site B</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">No</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">
But this gets a little more complicated with DOIs. In this case publisher <code>A</code> links to publisher <code>B</code> through the DOI system. This means there are two parts to the link. The first <code>(A-&amp;gt;doi.org)</code> results in a redirect (A-&gt;B). Again we use the last columns to indicate when referrer information is passed along to site B. Again, let’s look at row #2. It reads:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A user browses the site of member A using HTTP and clicks on a HTTP DOI link. The DOI system redirects the browser to member B using an HTTPS link registered with Crossref by member B. The middle column and the last column records whether Crossref and the publisher were able to see referrer information. The answer in both cases is “yes”. In the first case (A-&gt;DOI) because the link was from a less secure site (HTTP on A) to a more secure site (HTTPS at DOI). The second case because the link is between two sites at the same security level (HTTP).</span>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td><b>User views site A using</b></td>
<td><b>Site A links DOI using</b></td>
<td><b>Browser reports referrer to Crossref<sup><a href="#fn2">2</a></sup></b></td>
<td><b>Crossref redirects to site B using<sup><a href="#fn3">3</a></sup></b></td>
<td><b>Browser reports referrer to site B</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">1</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">2</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">3</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">4</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">5</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">No</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">No</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">6</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">No</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">No</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">7</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTP</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">No</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">8</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">HTTPS</span></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yes</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">
So what does this mean?</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Our old display guidelines recommended linking DOIs using HTTP. Rows #1, #2, #5, #6 represent the status quo.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">About half of our members support HTTPS. A few support it exclusively and it seems, given the industry pressures mentioned above, those who support both protocols are likely doing so as a transition stage to HTTPS-only sites.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This means that </span><b>the scenarios represented in row #5 &amp; #6 are already happening</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The referral information for any user viewing one of our member sites using HTTPS is being lost when they click on DOIs that use the HTTP protocol. Crossref doesn&rsquo;t get the referral data and neither does the member whose DOI has been clicked on.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Of course this applies to non-member sites that link to DOIs as well. Wikipedia is the largest referrer of DOIs from outside the industry. In 2015 The Wikimedia Foundation </span><a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/12/securing-wikimedia-sites-with-https/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">made a highly publicised transition</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to HTTPS on all of their sites. This means that any of our members who are running HTTP sites have already lost the ability to see any referral information from Wikipedia on their own sites. However, Crossref </span><a href="http://0-blog.crossref.org.libus.csd.mu.edu/2016/05/https-and-wikipedia.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">worked closely with Wikimedia</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to ensure that, at the very least, Crossref was still able to record Wikimedia referral data on behalf of our members.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">A solution</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">It is largely this work with Wikimedia that has helped us to understand just how important it is for Crossref to get ahead of the curve in helping our community to transition to HTTPS.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As long as our members are running a combination of HTTP and HTTPS sites, there is no way for our community to avoid some disruption in the flow of referral data. And we certainly would never entertain the notion of asking our members to keep using HTTP.The best we can do is recommend a practice that will help smooth the transition to HTTPS. That is what we are doing.Our new recommendation is to move to linking DOIs using HTTPS. This is represented in rows #3, #4, #7 and #8 in the table above. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is a particularly important step for our members who have already moved to hosting their sites on HTTPS. As long as they are using HTTP DOIs on their site, they will be sending no referral traffic to Crossref, other Crossref members or other users of the DOI infrastructure. This is captured in scenarios #5 and #6.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If our linking guidelines are followed during the industry’s transition to HTTPS, then scenario #5 and #6 will eventually be replaced with scenario #7. It is still not perfect, but at least it means that, during the transition, publishers who are still running HTTP sites will be able to get some DOI referral data via Crossref. And of course, once our members have widely transitioned to HTTPS, everything will go back to normal and they will be able to see referral data on their own sites as well (i.e.they will have moved from the state represented in row #1 to state represented in row #8.)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In summary, please change your sites to use HTTPS to link DOIs. They should look like this:</span></p>
<p><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7554/eLife.20320"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7554/eLife.20320">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7554/eLife.20320</a></span></a>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">FAQ</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> If I have moved my site to HTTPS, do I need to redeposit my URLs to that they use the HTTPS protocol instead?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> Yes. If you want to be able to still collect referrer information on your site (scenario #8) as opposed to via Crossref (scenario #7).</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> But can’t I avoid redepositing my URLs and get referrer data again if I simply redirect HTTP URLs to HTTPS on my own site?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> No. The browser will strip referrer information if there is any HTTP step in the redirects. Even if the redirect is done on your own site.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> Can I avoid having to redeposit all my URLs? Can’t Crossref just update the protocol on our existing DOIs for us?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> Contact </span><a href="mailto:support@crossref.org"><span style="font-weight: 400;">support@crossref.org</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. We’ll see what we can do.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> What about all the old PDFs that are are there? They link to DOIs using HTTP. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> That is true. But links followed from PDFs don’t send referrer information anyway.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> And what about my new PDFs? Should I start linking DOIs from them using HTTPS.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> Probably. But not because of the DOI referrer problem. Simply because HTTPS is a more secure, private, and future-proof protocol.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> Don’t some countries block HTTPS?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> Typically countries block specific sites and/or services. We do not know of any countries that have a blanket block on the HTTPS protocol.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> I use a link resolver that uses OpenURL + a cookie pusher to redirect my users to local resources. What do I need to do?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> You need to change your cookie pusher script to enable the <code>Secure</code> attribute for cookies for HTTPS-linked DOIs. </span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> Can I use protocol-relative URLs (e.g. </span><a href="https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7554/eLife.20320"><span style="font-weight: 400;">//doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20320</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> Protocol-relative URLs can be used in HTML HREFs to help ease the transition from HTTP to HTTPS, but use the full protocol in the text of the DOI link itself. So, for example, the following is fine:</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">
</span>
<pre><a href="//doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20320">https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.7554/eLife.20320</a></pre></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Q:</strong> I hear that HTTP and HTTPS versions of URI identifiers are considered to be different identifiers. Doesn’t this mean that by moving to HTTPS we are essentially doubling the number of DOI-based identifiers out there?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>A:</strong> Yes. It isn’t a problem that is only being faced by DOIs. Basically all HTTP-URI based identifiers face the same issue. We will put in place appropriate same-as assertions in our metadata and HTTP headers to allow people to understand that the HTTP and HTTPS representations of the DOI point to the same thing. </span></p>
<p><em>On a personal note (@gbilder speaking- don’t blame @CrossrefOrg) - it breaks my brain that the official line is that the protocol difference means they are different identifiers. As a practical matter (a concept the W3C seems to be increasingly alienated fro